


passed down like folk songs (the love lasts so long)

by its_tortle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Affection, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Avengers Family, Character Study, Crossover, During Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, F/M, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Lost Love, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Trust Issues, because diana is the only valid dc hero, but not between cap and diana, follows the mcu timeline though, lots of holding hands, no beta we die like steve's heterosexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26165953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/its_tortle/pseuds/its_tortle
Summary: “The man seems to notice that the blow isn’t coming and lowers the shield enough to reveal a confused, still on guard frown.Diana’s breath is knocked out for a moment. For just a second, the stranger in front of her had looked just like Steve. The blue eyes, blond hair, and strong jaw were almost enough as it is, but the determined fire in his eyes as he faces a fight bigger than himself is what really did it. He even does a similar double-take at her not-so modest armor.”ORthe one in which diana befriends another blond steve and they help each other get their lost loves back.
Relationships: Diana (Wonder Woman) & Steve Rogers, Diana (Wonder Woman)/Steve Trevor, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, background Natasha Romanov/Sam Wilson - Relationship
Comments: 78
Kudos: 190





	1. aliens and bucky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey lovelies!
> 
> i’ve been working on this fervently for a few weeks now, and am so happy to let it out into the world. i'm a huge mcu gal, but i love diana so much and think she deserves better than the dcu, so i've made her steve's friend.
> 
> this started off as a bunch of little scenes in my head that were quite challenging to piece together, so apologies if it's a bit choppy and all of my scenes and chapters are totally different lengths. i'm quite happy with it nonetheless.
> 
> enjoy!

  
  


Diana hasn’t been in the field much since 1945, or at all, really, when a wormhole opens above Manhattan in May 2012 and aliens pour out of it.

She’s in D.C. at the time, as luck would have it, curating some pieces for the Louvre from the Smithsonian, and happens to see live footage of the invasion on the TV screen of the Museum café. Taking a deep breath, she’s out of the rotating doors and on her way to New York a moment later.

Suddenly, she’s glad at her ever-paranoid self for the armor and lasso at the bottom of her bag. 

It’s chaos when she arrives in Manhattan. There’s people screaming and buildings collapsing and grotesque-looking aliens just about everywhere she looks. 

But amidst the chaos, she can spot a few individuals fighting back, keeping the aliens within a ten block radius of the wormhole. Iron Man is among them, flying around the outskirts of the battle and keeping it contained, and she almost startles at seeing the Hulk, who most believe is a conspiracy or myth, jumping between buildings and ripping at the aliens. The rest she can’t make out or recognize. Besides, there’s no time.

She throws herself into the madness head first. There’s a few civilians left, shouting and panicking and running for their lives, and Diana directs them to where she knows the coast is clearer. The few police officers that haven’t fled the scene take over for her, so she leaves them in the wake.

Slashing the disgusting creatures as they come in her way, Diana jumps up to the roof of the 34th street Target to get a vantage point. From here, at least a dozen stories up, she can see the scope of the problem. And, _fuck_ , is it a big one.

The aliens are not only strong and resilient, but there are so, so many of them. And they just keep pouring out of the portal. Iron Man, the Hulk, and whoever the rest are are doing an amicable job of keeping them contained, but it’s only a matter of time until the sheer number of creatures overpowers the few of them. 

Diana really, really hopes someone is working on closing the wormhole. 

She’s trying to figure out the best way to help when she spots a cluster of aliens closing in one one of the fighting individuals. The man, tall and built, is dressed in a skin-tight bright blue material that Diana would snicker at if she had any time, but with the creatures ganging up on him and his strength giving way to exhaustion, she leaps over the buildings toward him instead.

With a thud, she lands beside the fight and takes out the aliens from the outside in. They don’t see her coming from the back, so it fights her way through easily. By the time she gets to the man, he’s on one knee, bracing himself for a blow that won’t come -- she just decapitated that particular extraterrestrial -- with a big, round shield, red and blue with a star in the middle.

It looks familiar.

The man seems to notice that the blow isn’t coming and lowers the shield enough to reveal a confused, still on guard frown. 

Diana’s breath is knocked out for a moment. For just a second, the stranger in front of her had looked just like Steve. The blue eyes, blond hair, and strong jaw were almost enough as it is, but the determined fire in his eyes as he faces a fight bigger than himself is what really did it. He even does a similar double-take at her not-so modest armor.

She almost misses that he’s talking to her.

“Who are you?”, he demands as he straightens. His uniform is even more ridiculous up close, and if Diana just had a moment to think she could definitely place where she’s seen it before. 

“The person that just saved your ass.”

“Well, uh-” He looks a little startled. “Thanks.”

He’s about to open his mouth again when a loud crash in the building to their left calls for their attention. Two or three small alien ships are making its way over to them.

When the man, Not-Steve, turns to her again, it’s with a seeking look his eyes. 

“Can you fight?”

Diana nods determinedly. “That’s why I came.”

Not-Steve looks relieved. “Great.” He rolls his shoulders and motions uptown to where she can see a few small explosions go off in the sky. “We need to steer these motherfuckers up toward 28th. If we cluster them enough, Clint can take out the whole bunch.”

With no time to ask who Clint is, Diana gives him a curt nod and takes off to wrangle up some aliens. Judging by the way they’re already on her tail, they shouldn’t be too hard to lure in any direction.

When she looks back to see how Not-Steve is faring, he’s already running, slashing his way through the creatures with an impressive speed. Whoever he is, he can’t be human.

They fight long and hard, but the creatures don’t seem to let up any. They just keep coming. 

In the hurry of the battle, Diana channels all her energy into protection and survival, not paying any mind to the others fighting around her. She spots a woman with bright red hair jumping between two buildings at some point, but before she can make out any more than that, she’s being targeted with another alien blast. Most surprisingly, she notices a man fly by her and take out some of the creatures with what looks like _lightning_. If she had any time to, she’d figure out if the lighting was technological or celestial, but she doesn’t. She kicks another alien ship to spin off into a crash.

The next time she sees Not-Steve, it’s because he’s saving her ass. 

Having just been knocked down by a particularly hard blow of blue light from one of the extraterrestrial guns, she’s on the ground when another alien pounces upon her. She’s trying to avoid its strikes the best she can, but is still struggling to catch her breath from the blow and can’t find the strength to get it off of her.

Suddenly, _miraculously_ , the creature is hit and falls to her side. She glances at the dead alien in surprise to find the shield from earlier stuck in its neck.

Diana gets up with a wince and turns to her savior. “Thanks.”

“We’re even now,” Not-Steve shrugs with a smile, and Diana thinks he looks almost boyish.

She turns to the fallen creature and pulls the shield out of its neck, blue, gooey blood pouring out of the wound as she does so. 

With a grimace, she hands it back to Not-Steve. “Might wanna get that washed.”

He dignifies her bad joke with a snort.

A wretched sound rings out over the buildings as a whole new fleet of aliens streams in through the wormhole a couple blocks over. Another one of those giant, whale-like ships is among them.

“Is anyone working on closing the portal?”, she demands.

Not-Steve nods. Suddenly, he startles and holds a finger up to his left ear, an earpiece, Diana assumes, and lets out a frantic “ _Do it!_ ”

Another person must disagree because he looks up with a frown a moment later. “Stark, these things are still coming.”

A pause.

“What do you mean a _nuke_ ?”, he asks a little breathlessly. Then, “Fuck _off_ , I know what a nuke is.”

At this, Diana speaks up. “Wait. _What_?”

Not-Steve pays her no mind. “Stark. You know that’s a one way trip.” His voice is suddenly serious, subdued.

Diana thinks for a moment, tries to catch on to what’s happening. ‘Stark’, Tony Stark, presumably, is doing something with a nuclear bomb. A suicide mission. They have a way to close the portal.

Oh gods.

Is Stark planning to disappear into the wormhole with a bomb? It would work, probably, but he wouldn’t be likely to make it out.

Diana and Not-Steve both look up to see Iron Man whizz by, directing a missile on his back. She swallows and trails the figure with her eyes as it narrowly misses Stark Tower and disappears into the wormhole above it.

They stare at the tear in the sky, silent, waiting, anxious. Stark is no longer visible, and the creatures are still pouring out. 

Diana doesn’t think she’s breathing.

Then, suddenly, the creatures around them make a mechanical whirring sound and fall to the ground. She looks over at Not-Steve, but he looks equally startled.

Back up in the sky, the glow of an explosion is visible through the wormhole. The harsh blue darkness gives way to a warm light, burning its way closer to the opening above Manhattan.

They wait. But they can’t wait much longer.

Not-Steve lets out a defeated sigh from where he is staring up at the tear and says, “Close it.”

The blue beam of light that was holding the portal open ceases a moment later, and Diana lets out a breath as the wormhole slowly collapses in on itself. 

Then, through the last, tiny, hole in the sky, a figure is visible falling through it, down, down, into Manhattan. The tear seals itself behind him.

“Son of a gun.” Not-Steve’s voice takes on a whole lot of relief and just a bit of awe.

But the figure, Stark, isn’t catching itself. Diana notes with a pang of terror that he must be unconscious and is barrelling toward the ground at a fatal speed.

She prepares herself to leap across the building and catch him, but before she even has her footing right, the Hulk leaps from a roof and grasps Stark in his large, green arms. He skirts to a stop with only a couple thousand dollars of property damage.

Not-Steve takes off running to the scene barely a second later, and Diana follows him in a haze. She doesn’t know Stark, of course, but suicide missions don’t bode well with her. She needs to know if Stark made it out.

Hulk is at the scene, turning over the unconscious Stark, as is an unfamiliar man. He has long blond hair and is wearing armor that looks almost like something Amazonian, grasping a hammer that Diana can feel is celestial even from where she is twenty feet away. 

As soon as they arrive, Not-Steve is leaning down to check Stark’s body for breathing. The arc reactor is Stark’s suit, which is usually glowing blue, is gray and dead, and Stark’s face, no longer hidden by a mask, is unmoving.

Diana feels her blood freeze as Not-Steve hangs his head. Somehow, even the Hulk looks dejected.

He roars suddenly then, startling not only Diana, but also waking Stark into a startled inhale. 

“What the hell?”, he heaves. “What just happened? Please tell me nobody kissed me.”

Not-Steve -- Diana should really find out his name -- and the celestial stranger both break out into relieved and exhausted smiles. The hulk roars again.

“We won.”

Diana breathes a little easier. 

“What are you doing among us?”, the long haired man demands suddenly, turning to Diana.

She straightens. “I helped.”

Stark lifts his head with a grimace. “Oh god. Another one? We’re going to need a group chat or something.”

Not-Steve ignores him and looks up at Diana. “Where’d you learn how to fight like that?”

“My mother.”

Stark snorts. “We’re going to need more information than that, Athena.”

Diana frowns. “It’s Di-”

“You’re not human,” the long haired-one interrupts. He gives her a measured stare, but she refuses to be intimidated.

“Neither are you.”

He’s about to respond when two new figures come around a corner and walk up to the group. One of them is the redheaded woman Diana remembers seeing earlier, the other is a man in a black vest.

“Son of a bitch,” he says, spotting Stark who is now sat up on the asphalt. “He’s alive.”

“Not getting rid of me that easily, Barton,” Tony smirks. 

Diana almost admires Stark’s ability to joke and charm in any situation, but she also thinks he’s kind of a tool.

“Who’s this?”, the redhead asks briskly. She nods toward Diana, but looks to Not-Steve for an answer.

He sighs as he gets up from the road and half-heartedly brushes dirt off of his suit. “We’re working on figuring that out.”

“My name is Diana,” Diana tries, but she’s immediately cut off by Stark.

“Oh, great. She has a name.”

“Are you working with Loki?”, the redhead demands. Her voice is icy, almost menacing.

“I don’t know who that is,” Diana explains. “I was in D.C., I saw aliens on the news, I came to help.”

“Wh-”, the woman starts again, but the celestial cuts her off.

“She’s part god, this one.”

Diana swallows. She’s not used to people knowing this, especially when she doesn’t even know their names.

Not-Steve takes a commanding step toward her. “Is that true?”

Diana squares her shoulders. “Yes. I’m Diana, Princess of Themyscira, Daughter of Zeus.”

“How on earth are you not on our radar?”, the redhead asks, but before Diana can answer, the man in the vest, Barton, opens his mouth.

“Wait. There are Norse _and_ Greek gods?”

Diana frowns, but then turns to the celestial with a surge of clarity. “You’re Norse.”

“Thor,” he tells her, still in a fighting stance. “King of Asgard, Son of Odin, God of Thunder.”

“Pleasure.” She tries for a genuine smile, but she can feel its tightness.

Barton snorts. “Oh my god. Of course they have beef. We’re fucking watching god-beef. This is my life now.”

Stark snorts too. Not-Steve is helping him up. 

And Diana doesn't have beef with the Norse, per say, but of course their histories allow for some distrust. It’s been thousands of years since the wars between them, but their truce is reluctant, if not cold. The gods don’t fight for the sake of the humans, but they sure as Hades aren’t friends.

Stark limps over toward her and gives her a measuring frown. “You’re a good guy?”

Feeling everyone’s eyes on her, Diana considers her best answer. “I fight for mankind.”

“In that case,” Stark holds out his hand, “welcome to the team. I’m Tony. Stark. But you probably knew that.”

Diana shakes his hand. “Not voluntarily.”

“I like her,” the redhead smirks. She gives Diana a nod. “Natasha.”

“I’m Clint.” Vest-man says from beside her. “Barton. Or Hawkeye if you want to make me sound cool.”

Hulk grunts.

“I know who you are,” Diana tells him with a smile.

He makes little to no indication that he heard her and wanders off into the rubble. Not-Steve makes a move to go after him, but Natasha calls him back.

“Let him go, Cap,” she says. “He needs a moment to cool off.”

Diana looks over at Not-Steve, Cap, with a curious stare. Now that she has a moment to think about it, isn’t fighting tooth and nail for her survival, she recognizes the suit.

“You’re Captain America.” It’s not a question really, but also she needs him to confirm. After all, he’s to have died in March 1945.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Diana blinks “You were dead.”

“No, just frozen. The serum made my body icebox-able.”

She smiles at his outdated vocabulary. “Nice to meet you, Captain.”

He comes to shake her hand and good-naturedly says, “Steve, please.”

Of course.

His name is Steve.

Of fucking _course_ his name is Steve.

From the eyes to the hair to the damned airplane suicide mission, the name is a no-brainer.

It stings a bit, but it’s nothing she can’t handle.

Diana manages to shake herself out of the prolonged moment of a silence.

She smiles at the blond. “I’m gonna go with Rogers.”

He gives her a small, confused frown but doesn’t comment on it.

“Also,” she proclaims, turning to the others, “I’m not part of your superhero team. I won’t be. If aliens invade you can count on me, but I’m not great at teams and I’m even worse at having superiors.”

She never regrets her decision not to become an Avenger, but she almost changes her mind when she gets two-hundred pages of paperwork from S.H.I.E.L.D. in her mailbox a week later. 

Diana sighs, signs it, and goes back to her office in the Louvre.

More than a month later, sixteen minutes into her lunch break, Diana’s phone pings with a text. She opens it curiously.

_[Unknown Number]: Hey, Diana. This Steve Rogers from the New York alien invasion. I got your number from S.H.I.E.L.D., I hope that’s okay. You mentioned you live in Paris, and I’ll be there next week, so I was hoping that we could get a coffee? Or some lunch? Whatever you’re comfortable with. If you’d rather not, that’s okay too._

She stares at it for a moment, takes a sip of her smoothie.

The text is a bit formal, Rogers is clearly not sure what he’s doing, but it’s strangely adorable. She won’t respond though. She shouldn’t.

Diana doesn't do friends. Colleagues, sure, acquaintances, but not friends, not when she's sure to outlive them all. She'd had a whole bunch back in the twenties and thirties, one last one back in the seventies, but with every loss her walls became thicker and her resolve more impenetrable. 

Tired of grieving, Diana just sighs and puts her phone down. Rogers reminds her too much of Steve anyhow.

But, as was perhaps to be expected, Rogers doesn't let up that easily.

He texts her again the next morning, clarifying when he’ll be in Paris, and when she gets out of work that afternoon, there’s another text asking her which of two hotels she thinks is better.

Either Rogers doesn't know the two blue ticks means she’s left him on read, or he doesn’t know how to take a hint. She turns her phone off for the night.

When she switches it back on the next morning, she’s almost forgotten about the text chains. She just wants to check if the next episode of her favorite baking show is up already.

It’s not.

Instead, she’s greeted by another notification from Rogers.

_[Unknown Number]: Are you ghosting me?_

Before she can think better of it, she’s opening the chat and typing out a response.

_You know what ghosting means?_

The three moving dots appear just a moment later, and Diana startles at Rogers’ quick response. Being from the forties, he doesn’t seem like the kind of man to constantly be online.

_[Unknown Number]: Only since about five hours ago._

Diana laughs and saves his number in her phone. She may have been a little rude, she begins to think. After all, he probably needs a friend, and she might be the only option that understands his forties references.

_Sorry._

_Yes, I’m in Paris, and I could do lunch next week._

_Great!_

_Also do you possibly have any connections that could get me into the Louvre despite the fact that it’s sold out next week?_

_Aren’t you Captain America?_

_I want to be inconspicuous._

_That’s understandable._

_And yes, I can help you out. We can go together after lunch._

_Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!_

Diana locks her phone and heads for the shower. She’s not about to be late to work for the first time in twenty-eight years.

They text once more briefly, just to make concrete plans, before she’s walking toward him that next Thursday. He’s waiting outside her favorite café.

He looks better out of the uniform, she notes, not blind to the way his tight navy t-shirt is straining against his ridiculous chest. If it weren’t for his build, he could almost blend into a crowd with his white Chuck Taylor’s, Dodgers cap, and khakis.

“Rogers,” she greets.

“Diana.”

She motions to his cap. “Must’ve been quite the shock, waking up to find your baseball team in L.A.”

Rogers takes on an exaggeratedly pained expression. “I can’t even talk about it.”

Diana laughs, and they go inside.

They choose a table by the window, close to the door and in straight shot to the emergency exit, because old habits die hard. Rogers pulls out her chair for her, but it’s not condescending, just kind.

She thanks him.

Diana knows the waitress, Celeste, and greets her with a warm smile as they are handed the menus. Celeste makes a cheeky remark about how attractive her date is, and to Diana’s surprise, Rogers blushes and corrects her in not perfect, but decent French. 

They chat briefly before Celeste is called back into the kitchen.

“I didn’t know you spoke French,” she tells Rogers.

He shrugs. “Spent quite a bit of time in France. And Dernier never shut up, so.”

She smiles. “He was one of the Howling Commandos, yes?”

“Yeah,” Rogers nods. “He died a few years back, apparently. Has a daughter in Marseilles.”

A gust of warmth wafts into the room as a couple comes in from the sun. Diana watches as the young man helps untangle the woman’s sunglasses from her hair and she laughs. He kisses her disheveled hair.

“It must have been hard,” Diana says, turning back to Rogers, “Waking up with everyone gone.”

He shrugs a little dejectedly. “Sure. But, you know. C’est la vie.”

Diana allows herself a chuckle. “Not usually.”

“No,” he agrees amusedly. “Not usually.”

She lets Rogers look at the menu while she gazes out onto the street. She’s been here more times than she can count, so she knows exactly what she wants.

It’s the warmest week yet, this year, and the streets are filled with families and couples and groups of friends that are out to enjoy the sun. Diana can already tell it will be a hot summer. The first wave of tourists has already begun to trickle into the city.

“I can’t believe the prices these days,” Rogers complains, eyes still on the menu. “I mean, really, three euros for a cup of coffee?”

Diana grins. “You won’t find it much cheaper anywhere else in Paris. Or New York, for that matter.”

“It used to cost 15 cents.” 

“I know,” she tells him. “Inflation is a bitch. The prices have been shooting up nonstop since the seventies.”

At that, Rogers’ face takes on a curious frown. He leans forward in his seat.”Wait. How old are you?”

Diana looks back out the window and thinks for a moment. She hasn’t been asked that with anyone she can be honest with in a while. Mostly, she’s lying to bureaucrats and placing her birthday somewhere in the eighties, where it makes sense.

“A-hundred-and-forty,” she answers eventually. “Give or take a few years, I’m not sure. We didn’t have years in Themyscira the same way you do.”

Rogers’ eyes widen almost comically. “A-hundred-and-forty? Christ. And I thought I was old.”

Diana laughs. “We’re both a bit above average, I would say.”

“A bit.”

Celeste comes back to take their orders. Diana orders her usual, a croissant with raspberry jam and a latte, and Rogers asks for a black coffee and a chocolate éclair. 

“So, uh-”, Rogers starts as soon as they’re alone. “Where, or I guess what, is Themyscura?”

Diana finds herself impressed that he pronounces it correctly after only hearing it once. “It’s an island in the Aegean Sea," she answers, "off the coast of Greece. I grew up there among Amazons -- a female warrior tribe sent by the gods to fight in the great war that never really came the way it was prophesied. My mother is their queen.” 

Rogers nods, processes this. “Why does no one know about this island?”

“There’s an invisibility ward around it,” Diana explains. “And no one that seeks it is ever able to find it. Which includes me, now.”

“Wait. So you can’t go back?”  
  


Diana shakes her head.

Rogers looks as though he’s about to say something apologetic when Celeste comes with their coffees, sets them down on the table, and whisks off to serve other customers. 

Diana takes a sip of the beverage and feels its warmth travel down her throat and into her chest. Even if caffeine doesn't affect her, she loves the taste of coffee. She can’t imagine it affects Rogers either.

She asks.

“No, it doesn’t,” he tells her. “You?”

Diana shakes her head. “Can you get drunk?”

Rogers shakes his head then. “Nah. I drank two whole bottles of whisky in less than thirty minutes once trying, but no dice.”

“Must’ve been a rough night,” Diana jokes.

Steve briefly lifts his eyebrows in acknowledgement of her quip, but doesn’t seem to find it all that funny. "My best friend had died that day."

Fuck.

"I'm so sorry," she says quickly. "I-"

"No, it's no problem," he interrupts. "I'm fine, really."

Diana thinks for a moment, watches a waiter skirt around the tables. She remembers a name. "Barnes, was it? Your friend."

Rogers nods. "Yeah. Bucky. He was my only constant."

"I'm sorry for your loss."

Heels clacking on the wooden floorboards, Celeste comes back up to their table.

“Et voila,” she smiles setting down their pastries. “Bon appetit.”

They thank her and dig in, eating in silence for a minute or two. The couple from earlier is at the table behind Rogers and is speaking in low tones, voices wrapping softly around French vernacular. A car honks outside.

Rogers sets down his eclair and takes another sip of coffee. “When did you leave Themyscira?”

“1918,” she tells him.

His eyes widen as he smiles. “We’ve been around the same time then. I was born in ‘18.”

“Right,” she muses. “I remember reading that at some point. Forgive my not remembering.”

Rogers waves a placating hand. “Please. I welcome your not knowing everything about my life. Sometimes it seems like some people know me better than I do with the way they spew out facts they’ve read in some history book. It’s like they’re trying to impress me or something.”

“Fuck that,” Diana proclaims.

Rogers smiles, takes another bite of his eclair. “How have you managed to stay so hidden? I mean, S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t even know you existed.”

“Well,” she teases, spreading some jam on her croissant, “first step: don’t sign up to do stage shows and badly written movies.”

Rogers barks out a sheepish laugh and takes a sip of his coffee. “Right.”

“And also I’m rarely in the field,” Diana confesses, composing herself. “I haven’t been on the front lines since the First World War, I just helped smuggle people out and such in the Second. There’s a few conspiracies about me of course, about ‘Wonder Woman’ I should say, but they’re no more than that.”

“Impressive,” He remarks. “And I like the name.”

“Wonder Woman?”

He nods. “It fits.”

“Thanks,” Diana grins. “I’ve always kind of liked it myself. It’s ridiculous, of course, but at least it has alliteration.”

“Thank god for that.” Rogers toasts the air with his nearly empty cup. “I can’t believe I got stuck with fucking ‘Captain America’. And, honestly, I don’t mind it that much, but it seems that people took it a bit too literally while I was frozen. The government put me in tights, I don’t love them that much.”

Diana snorts into her coffee and laughs until her sides hurt.

And when she unlocks the back door of the Louvre and gives Rogers a personal tour, she watches his eyes light up and his hands gesticulate as he raves about Vermir’s brushwork and thinks that against her better judgement, she’s found a friend.

They stay in touch sporadically following that afternoon, text about art or inflation or TV shows. Occasionally, they’ll have a ranty phone call -- mostly from Rogers’ end -- about FOX news and the alt-right, or about Stark’s newest endeavours. Diana sends him Captain America memes whenever they show up on her feed.

They meet twice more, once in New York and once in D.C., but given their respective careers, they don’t make it across the Atlantic very often. It’s not a problem for either of them, the distance, but they do enjoy the time they get to meet. 

It’s refreshing for Diana to have someone to talk to, she finds, someone that isn’t a colleague (or not really, anyway). She finds that she trusts Rogers, to a reasonable extent, and knows that he has her back.

So, when she wakes up to the news that S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury is dead, Captain America is a fugitive, and tens of thousands of confidential S.H.I.E.L.D. documents have been leaked, she decides to have his back too. There’s live news footage of multiple giant helicarriers crashing dramatically into the Potomac.

She calls Rogers immediately, but, perhaps predictably, it goes straight to voicemail.

Diana goes back online and finds grainy photos of Rogers, along with Natasha and a man she doesn’t recognize, fighting a stranger with a metal arm in the middle of a busy highway. The article lists at least twelve casualties. Diana swallows.

She tries Rogers’ phone again, then Natasha’s. Voicemail, both times. 

With little to no hesitation, she books the next flight to D.C. on her phone and calls Yvonne to request some time off, apologizing for the short notice. Yvonne lets her have it easily, probably because Diana has used less than a week of her vacation days in nearly two decades. 

She’s in D.C. with a messily packed suitcase and her armor under her coat just over twelve hours later, sitting in a taxi headed toward S.H.I.E.L.D.’s headquarters. Former headquarters, maybe. 

Diana had read some of the leaked documents on the flight, at least that which she could download in time. She didn’t understand the majority of it, but she could recognize that it had effectively toppled the organization, exposing that HYDRA had been festering within it the entire time. It was a shock to her, but she imagines it’s an even bigger shock to Rogers and Natasha, who had not only worked for, but trusted the bureau. 

She hopes they’re okay physically, but also psychologically -- to the extent that they can be, at least.

When the taxi rolls up to the main S.H.I.E.L.D. entrance, Diana can immediately tell that Rogers won’t be here. She gets out anyway, tipping the driver generously, in the hopes that someone will be able to tell her where she can find him. 

As luck would have it, she spots a frazzled-looking Natasha leaving the main building just as the taxi drives off. The redhead is walking briskly toward a sleek black car to Diana’s left and doesn’t see her.

Diana calls out to her.

Natasha turns abruptly, searches for the source of the sound. When she finds it, she looks surprised, but not unpleasantly so. “Diana,” she calls, changing her course. “Shouldn’t you be in Paris?”

“I saw the news and you guys looked like you needed a friend. Or maybe a fighter. Or both, I don’t know.”

Natasha looks exhausted, but her lips quirk up at the ends. It’s a rare, genuine smile. “Both sounds good.”

Diana smiles, then remembers her friend. “Is Rogers okay?”

“Yeah.” Natasha’s smile tightens. “He’ll be fine.”

“What do you mean ‘will be’?” 

Twenty minutes and one nearly silent car ride later, they’re opening the door to the hospital room Rogers is in. Soul music streams out through the open door, setting the room apart from the eerie silence of the hall. The unfamiliar man from the grainy photos, dark-skinned and handsome, is sitting beside the bed and talking animatedly to Rogers, who listens with a mildly amused expression.

They both turn to the door as it opens.

“Nat,” the stranger smiles, revealing an adorable gap between his two front teeth. 

“Sam.” Her voice is warmer than Diana has heard it -- the man, Sam, must be a friend. 

Rogers sits up a little, ignores Sam’s motion for him to refrain from doing so. “Diana?”

“Hi,” she smiles.

“What are you doing here?” He frowns, and Diana suddenly feels like she was overstepping, coming here.

“I saw the news reels,” she explains, “and I thought you could use a friend.” She peers around the room. “Or, a third one, I guess.”

Rogers’ face breaks out into a grateful smile, and Diana relaxes.

Sam introduces himself as Sam Wilson, a new friend, and soon leaves with Natasha. They promise to bring Rogers some food when they return, and he thanks them with palpable relief, quipping a joke about the bad hospital food. Diana is glad to see him banter, but can tell that beneath that surface, he is exhausted and hurt.

Taking the seat Sam had left empty, she asks him what happened. She knows it's not an easy question even as she asks it.

Rogers is silent for a moment or three, then lets out such a deep, shuddering sigh that she can feel it in her bones.

He tells her about Fury’s visit to his apartment, about the USB-stick, about his death. He tells her about Natasha’s involvement, their discovery of a corrupt and HYDRA infested S.H.I.E.L.D., and the bunker in Jersey. It turns out Nick Fury wasn't dead, and HYDRA had set a highly trained assassin on their trail: the stranger with the metal arm from the highway. 

"So we were fighting, this man and I," Rogers says almost monotonously. "and I remember being confused about the fact that we were effectively matched. I mean, I'm not used to other people being as strong as me, but he was. Nearly enough, at least.”

He pauses. The music behind him, quieter than it was when Natasha and Diana entered, plays on.

“He was wearing a mask -- you probably saw.” Diana nods. “But at some point I managed to knock it off and he turned to me and I-” 

Rogers falters for a moment, then looks up at Diana with the most pained expression she thinks she’s ever seen. “It was Bucky.”

Diana tenses. “What?”

“And I called out his name,” Rogers continues, “But he just looked at me like he didn’t know who, or _what_ , that was. He hesitated though, for a solid five seconds, so that has to count for something, right?”

She nods. “Definitely. But how is he Bucky? He should be nearly a hundred now, if he survived.”

“Fuck if I know,” he says helplessly. “But it’s him. I know it is. It was his face and his voice and the exact color of his eyes. HYDRA did something to him, something horrible, and I need to find him, get him out.”

“I can help.”

Rogers shakes his head. “No, Diana. It’s not your fight, and I can handle it. I’m fine. I’m okay.”

Diana can do little more but stare at her lap as she processes all he said. “You're not okay.”

“I just said-”

“It's okay to not be okay. And I know you aren't. You can’t be, given the circumstances.”

Rogers takes a deep, shuddering breath.

Not entirely certain of what to say, Diana just waits and lets him gather his thoughts.

"I just-" He falters, pauses. " I don't have time not to be okay. I have to save him. I _have_ to."

Diana nods. She wishes she had a chance to save Steve. "You will."

"But you don't know that." Rogers' voice suddenly takes on an angry note. "What if he's too far gone? What if HYDRA already killed him years ago?"

He's clearly prepared to continue, but Diana cuts him off.

"You said he hesitated," she reminds him insistently. "When you said his name. You said there was a five second window where he could have taken a shot and didn't."

Rogers stays silent. His eyes drop to his lap.

Diana folds a leg under herself to face him fully. "If anyone can save him it's you, Rogers. And you don't seem the type to back down from a fight."

He huffs out a little laugh, and his somber gaze turns sentimental, warm. "I'm not, usually, even when I'm set up to lose. Bucky used to bitch at me about it. He pulled me out of so many back alley fights back before I could win them. I insisted that I didn't need protecting, and he agreed, just told me he had my back. He was the only one who didn't make me feel weak back then."

“With your connection, your history,” Diana assures him. “Bucky will remember you. I know he will.”

“No, you don’t.”

Diana opens her mouth to argue, but then just closes it, sighs. “No, I don’t.”

Rogers holds out his hand for her to take and she does. They listen to Marvin Gaye sing on about poor Abbey Walsh.


	2. robots and romance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey lovies!
> 
> i really will try to abide by once a week updates but uni just started and i'm moving next week so please excuse any delays.
> 
> enjoy!

Less than a year later, Diana's phone goes off in the middle of the night. She grabs it in the dark, still half asleep when she answers.

"Diana." Rogers’ voice comes through the speaker sounding stern, serious, desperate. "This is incredibly short notice and I'm sorry, but we've got an end-of-the world-as-we-know-it sort of situation. How soon can you be in Sokovia?"

"Sokovia?" Diana had rarely even heard of the small Eastern European country.

"It's a long story."

Diana gets up, splashes some cold water on her face, and is in Sokovia barely three hours later. 

Rogers fills her in when she arrives, not that she can quite believe what he’s saying. Joined by two experimented on twins with powers and Stark’s AI J.A.R.V.I.S. with a body, the Avengers are facing Ultron, another creation of Stark’s. Diana barely has time to greet her old acquaintances and introduce herself to Wanda, Pietro, and the Vision, before the fight comes to them.

When Diana had left Themyscira all those years ago, she really did not think that she would be fighting an army of robots in a floating city in 2015. 

It’s insanity. There’s houses collapsing and people screaming and robots ganging up on the lot of them. Not to mention the ever-pending fear of the knowledge that if the city falls, if they don’t find a way to stop Ultron, billions more will die.

The robots are a bitch to kill, too.

Hours later, two Avengers down and with an estimated two hundred civilian casualties, the crisis is finally averted. Diana watches from the helicarrier as Novi Grad explodes into a flare in the sky. Debris falls to the forest below them, and into the gaping hole that used to be Sokovia’s capital. 

She can’t help the tear that escapes her eye at the sight. Rogers lays his hand on her shoulder from where he is beside her, almost looking like he could shed a tear too if he let himself.

He doesn’t though, is back to helping Sokovians find their loved ones on the ships a moment later. It’s admirable, of course, but Diana wishes he knew to take a moment for himself every once in a blue moon. 

Now is not the time to confront him about it, so she joins him in his efforts. It breaks her heart when she can’t help some of the searching, when she has to tell them that their mothers, sons, sisters, or husbands were lost in the chaos. Diana’s not used to being on this end of the job when she hasn’t had to do it in years. It exhausts her.

So when the helicarriers land on the ground and the Avengers are dismissed, Diana falls asleep on the flight back to the compound. 

The sleep is not particularly deep, is riddled with flashes of flying robots and scared faces and a crumbling city, but she feels reasonably well-rested when she’s awoken by their landing. Clint, Wanda, and Stark look to be waking from naps too, but Natasha and Rogers look stoic, exhausted only under a tough exterior. Thor looks deep in thought.

Diana supposes they’ll catch up on the sleep that night, so she’s surprised to find Rogers at the kitchen table at 3 AM. She’d only slept a few hours herself, plagued by images of the battle and already somewhat rested by her nap. She awoke hungry. 

In the dim shine of the stove light, she finds Rogers’ wide shoulders hunched over the kitchen table. With a large mug of coffee beside him, he’s reading something on his laptop.

“I thought caffeine didn’t affect you,” she remarks softly.

Rogers startles. His lips quirk wearily. “It doesn’t. I’m hoping for a placebo effect, I guess.”

Diana musters him, taking note of the bags under his eyes and heavy eyelids. He hasn’t slept at all, she realizes. He’s showered and changed, but not slept.

“Or, you could go to sleep.”

Rogers huffs a tired laugh. “Yeah, maybe. I’m fine, though.”

Turning from where she’s getting a yogurt out of the fridge, Diana just raises an eyebrow at him.

“Super-soldier serum.” He motions at himself. “Remember?”

“I’m a demi-goddess and I still need sleep. I think that means you do too, Rogers.” 

He just shrugs and takes another sip of his coffee.

Diana takes the seat across from him at the table and peels open her yogurt, watching as Rogers turns his attention back to his laptop screen, eyes heavy but scanning the screen in front of him with a focused fervor. He’s exhausted, clearly, but he’s also not willing to let what’s in front of him wait for a few hours. She has a suspicion of what it might be.

She asks anyway.

“Oh, uh.” Rogers averts his eyes from the screen only briefly to look up at her. “Some of the S.H.I.E.L.D. documents. HYDRA, I should say. Bucky’s here, between the lines, I just- It’s impossible to find him.”

Diana gives him a sympathetic smile. “Maybe he’ll be less impossible to find if you’re more awake.”

“Jesus,” he shoots her a look. “I’m fine. Stop babying me.”

“You need to take care of yourself,” she tries again.

“Diana, stop. I can’t-”

“You can’t save Bucky if you’re half-delirious from sleep deprivation,” she affirms. “Or if you’re about to pass out because you haven’t eaten.”

Rogers’ jaw remains in an angry set, but he doesn’t retort. She counts this as a win.

Taking a deep breath and finishing her yogurt, she rises. “I’m going to get you one of Stark’s weird nutrition smoothies, and you’re going to drink it, and then you’re going to go to sleep.” 

Rogers looks almost startled for a moment, then he smiles. “Now you just sound like Bucky.”

“He’s got a point, don’t you think?”

With a defeated sigh, Rogers closes the laptop and complies.

  
  
  


Diana is back in New York on a curating job three months later and shoots Rogers a text. He sends her the address to his Brooklyn apartment.

When Rogers opens the door, Diana is happy to see that he looks reasonably well rested. He’s in jeans and a cozy-looking cable knit, looking comfortable and warm. His feet are fuzzy and colorful. 

“I can’t believe Captain America wears fluffy socks,” she smiles.

He rolls his eyes, but grins. “Good to see you, Di.”

Rogers pulls her in for a hug and then let’s her inside.

Standing in the hall, Diana takes a look around and is glad to see that he’s added just a few personal items to what she’s certain used to be a very drab flat. She’d only been in his D.C. apartment once, but she remembers how empty it had looked, how void of any personality. This one is not perfectly lived in, but at least there’s a few novels and knick knacks on the shelves, and a knit blanket that looks like Wanda’s handiwork thrown over the sofa. He’s even hung up four frames.

Diana walks up to them and looks.

The first is filled with a selfie of Rogers with Sam, Natasha, and her, taken during Diana’s visit to DC back in 2014. They’re all smiling, backdropped by the giant lion statue in the Smithsonian zoo -- Sam had insisted Diana see some of the sights while she was there. They look relaxed and friendly and almost normal, like four friends out for a day at the zoo, not superheroes trying to recreate some semblance of commonality. Diana smiles at the memory.

The second frame houses a grainy photo of the Howling Commandos. They’re in uniform, standing huddled close in a forest. It was probably taken from some historical archive, but something about their proud stances and matching insignias excludes a familiarity. 

Diana looks at the third for a little longer. It’s another old photo, this one of a petite young woman with her hand on the shoulder of a boy around fourteen. They’re both smiling, dressed in what must have been their best clothes, though the boy’s shirt is about three sizes too big and the woman’s dress has a visibly sewn up tear in the sleeve. Diana finds that Sarah Rogers was beautiful, and that her son was the strong man he is now before he even knew it.

She moves on to the fourth frame to find it filled not with a photo, but with an incredible drawing. It’s charcoal on cardboard, dirty around the edges from finger smudges and torn a little at the corner, but Diana thinks it belongs in the Louvre. A striking likeness of Bucky looks back at her, impressively accurate from the few pictures she’s seen of him. It’s a portrait, slightly from the side, Bucky looking over at what Diana assumes must be Rogers with laughing eyes and a coy smile on the gentle curve of his lips. The lines are strong in some places, soft in others, but there’s an underlying care to every stroke. There’s so much emotion in it that it knocks out Diana’s breath for a moment.

Rogers notices her staring and walks over to where she’s standing. 

“I drew that the day before he died,” he confesses from beside her. 

Diana tears her eyes from the work and looks to her friend. If Rogers loved Bucky even near as much as she loved Steve, which she supposes he does, his pain must overwhelm him at times. She knows it does her, even now.

“Well, he looks wonderful,” she tells him earnestly. “The drawing seems a great likeness.”

“Thank you.” Rogers smiles a little sadly. 

Diana just returns the smile as encouragingly as she can and lays a hand on his arm. He turns from the wall of frames and toward the kitchen.

“Wine?”, he asks.

“Gods, yes.”

They open an expensive-looking bottle of Chardonnay (a gift from Stark, apparently), and chat about everything and nothing as they make a lasagna for dinner. Rogers is an abysmal cook, but Diana makes up for it by happening to be an excellent one. She’s had many, many years to practice and finds it relaxing, which Rogers finds comical. 

He tells her that he’s never really had to cook, went from his mom to Bucky to army rations to communal food at Stark-Tower or takeout. He can make a grilled cheese or some simple pasta, but that’s kind of where his skills end.

“One time when I was nineteen,” Rogers tells her as he lays a layer of lasagna on top of the sauce, “Bucky was working the late shift at the docks on Christmas Eve, and I thought it would be a great idea to surprise him with dinner. We didn’t have much, mind you, but I wanted to cook up the potatoes we had left along with a bit of meat I had managed to wrangle up. There were carrots too, I think. Anyway, I was hoping on Buck walking in to a warm meal but instead he walked into me having an asthma attack from all the smoke I had created by being spectacularly incompetent.”

Diana laughs. “Were you okay?”

He gives her an amused grin and motions to himself. “Well, yeah. Obviously. But Bucky made me promise to never try and cook without him there again.”

“And did you abide by that?”

Rogers draws out an uncertain sound.

They laugh again.

Hours later, they’re sprawled out on the couch, watching _The Good Place_ and sharing a bag of chips. They’re mostly silent, chuckling when there’s a particularly funny joke or making comments about Jason’s dumbassery or how much they hate Vicky.

Diana has one leg folded under herself, knee resting against Rogers’ thigh. She finds herself soaking up the contact. It’s rare that she gets to have this, the steady warmth of just having someone beside her, touching for no other reason than that it’s nice and comforting. 

Even through two layers of clothing, she can feel his steady pulse and the way his muscles flex when he laughs, just for a moment. While she knows he’s more than that, Rogers feels so delightfully human.

They reach the part of Season 2 in which Micheal has an existential crisis when he realizes that even as an immortal being, death is a real possibility. Diana can feel Rogers turn to her in the dim light of the living room.

“Did you ever have a moment like that?”, he asks, quietly, because somehow the situation calls for it.

“One where I got a tacky earring, drove a sports car, and got myself a fake trophy wife?” 

He dignifies her evasion with a little huff, but says nothing. He’s waiting for her to answer, but also giving her a way out if she wants it. 

Gods, he’s lovely. 

“Not really,” she confesses eventually. “I’m kind of okay with the idea of dying. I have to be, with how much I’m faced with it. I mean, Michael’s not a warrior. I was raised as one.”

Rogers nods, his gaze set on her face. “I never thought I’d make it past thirty, never mind ninety-eight,” he tells her after a moment of thought. “ I feel like I’ve just spent all my life telling death to fuck off.”

Diana smiles.

They settle back into a silence, though it’s clear neither of them are paying attention to the show anymore. It drones on as background static, joining the sounds of the dishwasher running in the kitchen and the sirens in the distance outside the window. It’s started raining lightly, and the drops fall in a mesmerising beat on the tiles of Rogers’ balcony.

Diana opens her mouth again, speaks even more quietly than before. “Dying was never the hard part, I think. It’s the outliving everyone else.”

Rogers nods lightly, but remains silent. His hand finds her knee, warm and solid, tracing circles into the cotton of her pants.

“You’re my first friend since 1976,” Diana confesses suddenly.

Those blue eyes find hers again, almost but not quite Steve’s. She doesn’t look away like she probably should.

Rogers smiles. “And you’re the only person that makes me feel like I’m actually thirty-two.”

Before she can even tell who moves first, they’re kissing. His lips move softly first, but then desperately, frantically over hers. She gives back all she has, searching for Steve, for comfort, for home. His hand snakes around her waist and she tangles on into his hair. He’s a good kisser.

She licks into his mouth, presses ever closer, when he suddenly stops her. His hand is firm on her sternum, pushing her back, making her take a breath.

“Fuck,” he breathes, “stop.”

She crumbles, heaves.

“I’m not-” he falters. “I’m not whoever you were imagining I was.”

Diana’s brain finally gets with the program. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“No,” Rogers waves her off. “No need. I went in for that too.”

“But I’m not him, either.” she concludes. She’s still trying to de-frazzle her mind and catch her breath.

“Him?”

Diana looks up to see a confused frown, and finds herself confused in return. “Bucky.”

Rogers’ frown deepens. “What? Bucky and I aren’t like that. We’re- We were best friends.”

“Oh. I- Sorry, I kind of assumed…” She trails off. 

Now that she thinks about it, he never indicated they were ever more than platonic, but she supposes that his palpable heartbreak at Bucky’s death and determination to save him had just struck her as romantic. Perhaps she had just been channelling her own feelings, though.

“It’s fine,” he assures. “But, yeah. We were friends.”

“Are we?”, Diana asks, suddenly anxious.

“Friends?”

She nods.

His smile is so warm that she feels it from the inside out. “Of course. Always. I love you, you know that. Just-”

“Not like that,” Diana finishes.

“Not like that. My heart wasn’t in it.” Rogers sounds just a bit pained to admit it.

“Neither was mine.”

“I know.”

He grasps her hand. She grasps it back.

It’s nice to have a friend.

Diana has become somewhat accustomed to waking up to calls from Rogers by 2016, but when she picks up her phone one Wednesday night in March, she frowns at seeing Stark’s name flash on the screen.

“Stark,” she greets, not unkindly, but expecting business. She’s right, of course.

“Diana. I just sent you an email, and I’m going to need you to agree to the document.” His voice is free of the teasing mirth she would usually expect from him.

Suddenly annoyed that she was awoken, Diana lets out an exasperated sigh. “This couldn’t have waited until it wasn’t” -- she checks the clock -- “4 AM?”

“Oh, sorry,” Stark says, sounding not very apologetic. “I forgot about the time difference. Point is, I’m going to need you to read through it first thing and agree to sign. And maybe try and get Cap and his possy in check.”

Tired, and just wanting to go back to sleep, Diana agrees.

She doesn’t agree with the document, though. She reads through the proposed Accords over her morning coffee and finds that she fundamentally disagrees with a lot of it. 

The concept is sound, but things like “ _Any enhanced individuals who do not sign will not be allowed to take part in any police, military, or espionage activities, or to otherwise participate in any national or international conflict, even in their own country”_ and _“Those with innate powers must also wear tracking bracelets at all times”_ make her blood boil. Bureaucrats and politicians are not in charge of the Avengers for good reason. What happens the next time aliens invade a major city? Are they going to file a motion to defend earth and wait on a verdict? Gods, no.

She texts Rogers.

_I take it you don’t agree with the Accords either?_

Two minutes later, her phone pings.

_No. They undermine every purpose that we serve in the first place._

_So what now, Captain?_

_I don’t know._

_That’s a first._

_I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later._

Rogers isn’t usually so short with her, but Diana blames it on the stress of the Accords until she sees the newsreels an hour later. Peggy Carter is dead.

She swallows, watches in an almost numb state as the reporter gives a monotonous eulogy with little to no personal information. She can’t imagine how Rogers feels right now. Except, she almost can.

_I’m so sorry about Peggy. I know lost loves are hard._

_She lived a wonderful, abundant life. You still have time to do the same._

Diana isn’t expecting a fast response, but she’s barely locked her phone when she gets it. 

_Thank you._

_Maybe you’ll tell me about him one day._

Staring at the message, Diana ponders how to respond when another text comes in a moment later.

_Or her._

A grin breaks out on her face.

_I feel as though I should send that to FOX News._

_Please do. :)_

That conversation ends there, but they have a phone call about the Accords that evening. Rogers agrees with her on all the bullshit requirements and also doesn’t want to sign them. Neither do Wanda or Sam. Clint has agreed to retire.

They both come up with little to nothing as far as solutions go, but neither want to do the same. 

Diana isn’t fighting too often, not unless there’s a global emergency, but she refuses to give up her right to fight when she’s needed. Also, she would hate to give up her anonymity. She’s too glad to live her life in Paris separately from all the superhero-business, and wants an opportunity to just be Diana Prince when she wants to be.

Rogers simply feels the responsibility to win every fight there is to fight. It’s just how he’s wired. He also doesn’t trust institutions though, not after the government made him a dancing monkey and certainly not after S.H.I.E.L.D.

“I won’t sign them,” Rogers concludes. “I can’t. And if they want me to retire I’ll agree, but not without crossing my fingers behind my back.”

“They won’t let that slide, you know. As soon as you’re back out fighting they have the right to arrest you.”

He sighs deeply. “I know. But I don’t know what else to do.”

“Me neither.”

They exchange a few more helpless comforts and hang up soon after, go back to their routines. Diana blasts her music louder than she probably should when she goes on her run -- anything to distract from thinking about the Accords, even if it is just for a few hours.

When she gets back to her apartment in the afternoon, she checks her phone to see a text from Stark.

_You’re only making this harder on yourself, Diana._

She leaves him on read and makes a sandwich.

The official UN summit to sign the document is scheduled for that Saturday in Vienna. Neither Rogers nor Diana choose to go, seeing as neither wish to sign. Diana works a late day at the office and Rogers attends Peggy’s funeral in London. She leaves him a voicemail of moral support, hoping he’ll actually listen to it.

Neither of them see the news of the bombing until nearly an hour after it occurs. 

Diana checks her phone as she walks home to find it flooded with newsreels and live-streams and a few missed calls. She lets out a breath when she realizes Natasha is among those notifications.

She calls back before even checking a single article. Her friend’s welfare takes priority.

“Diana.” Natasha’s voice is relieved, but urgent through the receiver.

“Nat,” Diana breathes. “Are you okay? You were there, right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“How many casualties?”

“Just one,” Natasha tells her “T’Chaka, King of Wakanda. His son might be a problem, though. He’s sworn revenge and with the way he was talking to me, even I don’t want to know what that entails.”

Diana stops in her tracks, confused. “Wait. Revenge? Who was behind this?”

“You haven’t seen anything at all, have you?”

Suddenly, Diana is overcome with an inexplicable feeling of dread. “No.”

Natasha sighs. “Video cameras identified Barnes, so the whole world is looking for his face. I tried to tell Steve to stay out of it, but he won’t listen to me. Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”

“Why does everyone always assume he’ll listen to me?”, Diana finds herself asking. She knows it’s not the most important question to ask just then, but she can’t help wondering.

“He looks up to you. No one else here is older than him, maybe that helps.”

The remark is quite funny, but right now Diana has no capacity for amusement.

“I’ll try,” she says, staring across the empty street beside her. “But I think we both know that he won’t stand down. Not when it comes to Bucky.”

Natasha sighs again, more wearily than before. She pauses for a moment, seems to be pondering her next move.

“He and Sam are on their way to Bucharest to get Barnes before the authorities do. They could probably use your help.”

Diana allows herself a smile. “Aren’t you on the other side here?”

“Maybe,” Natasha smirks audibly. “But being a double agent is kind of my thing.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t get yourself killed.”

The call clicks to an end and Diana is left to run another two blocks home, and then get to Bucharest. Something tells her this is going to be a long fight.


	3. half of the avengers and the obliviousness of one (1) super-soldier

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know it's been WAY too long, but i moved and then uni started and things got so incredibly busy, just for me to get hit with writer's block. i've posted a whole bunch of other ficlets/one shots this week though, which got rid of my writers block and also gave you guys some stucky content, so check those out if you haven't already.
> 
> sorry for the long wait, enjoy!

_last chapter recap:_

_The call clicks to an end and Diana is left to run another two blocks home, and then get to Bucharest. Something tells her this is going to be a long fight._

\- 

She’s right, of course.

When she arrives in Bucharest, Diana follows Nat’s instructions on where to find Rogers and Sam only to spot them already causing chaos, because of course they are. 

She catches sight of them just as Rogers jumps off of the balcony of a tall building and barely makes it onto the rooftop beside him. Judging by the recklessness of the move, Bucky must be on said rooftop

After just a moment to get her footing right and chart a path, Diana is rushing to it in leaps and bounds. A few cars honk at her and she thinks she hears a few startled civilians, but nothing is more important than helping Rogers get to Bucky. Not now. 

When she reaches the top of the building, there’s already helicopters shooting at the three other figures on it: Rogers, Bucky, and a man in all black she doesn't recognize. The unfamiliar suit is skin-tight, but durable looking, and has what almost looks like pointed ear decals atop the head.

For just a moment Diana triumphs in the belief that they have additional backup, but the way the man is pinning Bucky to the ground makes her realize he’s actually just another enemy. Great.

Sam, aided by his Falcon wings, kicks the helicopter to spin off toward the next building. Taking advantage of the distraction, Diana pulls the unfamiliar figure off of Bucky with Hestia’s Lasso, expecting Bucky to turn and thank her, or maybe see her as another threat and seek refuge with Rogers.

Instead, his grey-blue eyes muster her for only a moment before he’s taking off, jumping off of the rooftop with a small backpack in hand.

The man in the black suit gets up and on his tail immediately, almost feline in the graceful way that he moves. 

Diana gives Rogers an incredulous look, but doesn’t really have time to ask any questions just then. They both follow Bucky and Cat-Man.

“How did you know where to find me?”, Rogers asks her as they run. He’s not out of breath barely at all.

“Nat.”

He smiles, somehow, even while sprinting down a busy road with shots raining on him. “Figures.”

  
  


Another helicopter joins the two already shooting at them, and Diana has to admire how smartly and deftly Bucky jumps into a tunnel below them to avoid the shots. They all follow.

The tunnel is filled with cars and Diana only briefly has time to feel bad for the people just trying to get home from work as she dodges vehicles and ignores the countless honks they provoke. 

A black car with blaring sirens is yelling at them to back down in a strong German accent, but neither Rogers nor Diana pay it any mind. They strain themselves just a bit harder.

Cat-Man is gaining on Bucky fast -- he must be somehow enhanced as well -- and in a reckless move that she’s surely going to reprimand Rogers for later, her friend jumps onto the windshield of the black car and causes it to halt to a stop with skin marks on the asphalt. He’s driving it just a punch later, Diana in the passenger seat.

She holds on to the dashboard, watching as Rogers only narrowly avoids the cars around him at at least 80kmh. She vaguely wonders if he even has a modern licence. She knows he didn't three years ago.

When they pass Cat-Man, the figure latches on to the back of the vehicle in a swift jump and both Rogers and Diana startle, not having expected it.

“I’ll get him off,” Diana promises. 

She opens the window and crawls out, holding on tightly to the ridges of the roof as she does so. The wind resistance is considerable, but it’s nothing she can’t handle, so she simply tightens her grip and begins to crawl toward Cat-Man.

Diana delivers a kick to his head with a quick swivel of her hips, but he dodges it with an almost eerie elegance and somehow looks unimpressed even though she can’t see his face. He takes a swing, hands adorned by what look like actual _claws_ and only narrowly misses her arm. With how sharp they look, Diana is glad for her reflexes.

There’s still sirens on their trail, and there are more by the second. Suddenly, Diana has absolutely no idea how they’re going to get out of this.

Bucky is still ahead of them, dodging cars expertly and weaving his way down the road at an impressive speed. He switches onto the opposing side of the road, and Diana has to hold on tight as Rogers follows, barrelling through a few hurdles as he does.

Finally, after a handful of missed swings and kicks, Diana manages to knock Cat-Man off the back of the vehicle. She climbs back into the passenger seat just in time to watch Bucky knock a man off of a motorcycle mid-ride and spin in the air to ride it himself.

She reacts with a gaping mouth, not sure whether to be surprised or impressed or scared. A look at Rogers’ face tells her that he’s mostly impressed with a side of something else she has no time to inspect right then.

Bucky, more agile on the bike than Rogers and Diana are with the van they’re in, weaves his way through the bright orange columns of the tunnel in the hopes of shaking them off, but Rogers is relentless, following through even the tightest spots as Diana prays to the Gods that they won’t crash and burn and get arrested.

In the rear view mirror, Diana suddenly catches sight of Sam trailing after them, only to be slowed by Cat-Man hanging on to his leg. She swears.

But the light at the end of the tunnel, literally, is growing brighter before her, and then everyone will be easier to shake off.

Then, one sharp arm movement from Bucky later, the opening to the tunnel collapses behind him in an explosion none of them anticipated.

Half startled and half sensing opportunity to shed himself of Cat-Man, Sam stops suddenly and hurls the black figure toward where the rubble is falling into the tunnel. Somehow, Cat-Man makes it through.

With no way to stop the car from colliding with the rubble, both Diana and Rogers make a swift exit and leap through the last available opening before the car dramatically crashes behind them. 

They find Bucky on the ground, the motorcycle beside him, with Cat-Man hovering above him with those sharp claws out. Diana makes a grab for the lasso, but Rogers leaps to knock Cat-Man off of Bucky before she can even blink.

They all stand, still in a fighting stance, trying to figure out their next move.

But the sirens are everywhere, blaring and blinking and frankly loud enough to give Diana a headache if she were human. They’re surrounded. There’s nowhere else to go.

Rogers holds out his arm toward Bucky and steps out in front, like that may protect his best friend from the scrutiny before them, but of course it doesn’t.

They watch as Bucky gets forced down to his knees, a pained look on his face, and Diana looks over at Rogers to see that his jaw is clenched to a probable point of pain.

She wants to reach out and comfort him, but they’re already putting handcuffs on her.

There’s nothing to do but let themselves get arrested.

  
  


They’re all brought to Berlin in high security transport, cuffed to the seat below them. Bucky is in a separate vehicle, confined by some dystopian-looking glass cage.

Rogers is silent the whole time, somewhere between seething and heartbroken beside Diana. If she could, she would reach out and grab his hand, his knees, his arm, anything, just to ground him and remind him that he’s not alone, but she can’t. The cuffs are too tight. She could say something, of course, but she really can’t think of a single thing beyond a trite platitude and she knows that would just make Rogers angrier.

So, she stares out the small, grimy windows beside her and tries to find one single way for them to get out of this.

In Berlin, they’re unloaded like cargo and informed that their uniforms and gadgets (if the Lasso can be called a gadget, which Diana _really_ thinks it can’t be) have been confiscated. Bucky, who looks somber and resigned in his ridiculous cage, will be questioned by a U.N. psychiatrist. 

Rogers is laughed at when he rightfully asks if Bucky will get a lawyer. Diana sees his shoulders steel, but she reaches out and soothes them to the best of her ability and watches him deflate just enough so that he won’t blow up. He’ll ask at the next-best opportunity, though, she’s certain.

Rogers, Sam, and Diana are led upstairs to where Natasha and Stark are awaiting them. They look exhausted, and a little frazzled, especially Tony. Natasha has mastered taking every hardship with a grace Diana can only dream up.

Nat leads Sam and Diana to get some food from an overstocked kitchen as Stark and Rogers disappear into an office. 

They all stand around the counter island and eat some toast, silent for a while. None of them really know what to say. Besides, they’re waiting to hear if the conversation between the two big guys turns into a shouting match. 

Everything feels precarious, hanging by a thread. Diana taps her foot on the tiled flooring and wonders how and when it’s going to snap. Part of her thinks she should be appreciating the over-expensive Brie on her sandwich, or become somewhere between exasperated and enamoured at the way Sam and Nat steal not-so-subtle meaningful glances over the counter top, but her brain is too loud.

About ten minutes later, the large glass doors to the office swing open and Rogers stalks out. Diana sighs, hears Sam do the same. They both know that there can’t have been a satisfactory consensus, not with the way Rogers is fidgeting.

With one last touch of Sam’s shoulder and a rueful smile in Diana’s direction, Natasha goes to stand with Tony. Sam and Diana join Rogers.

They all watch on slightly grainy screens as the UN psychiatrist sits down in front of Bucky and begins to ask him questions. The look on Rogers’ face as Bucky proclaims his own name makes Diana want to cry, but she turns back to the screens just in time to watch it go dark. The lights around them give out too. 

In a panic, they look to Natasha and Stark, but they look equally confused and Diana’s blood runs cold. With a desperate and sympathetic glance through the glass, Natasha clearly mouths _Sub-level 5, East Wing_ , and they take off.

They arrive at the level to find it strewn with bodies, dead or unconscious, terrifyingly illuminated with fluctuating red lights. Down a series of long hallways, they reach the room in which Bucky must have been.

A man lies on the floor, seemingly wounded, but very much alive. They rush toward him, help him stand. 

“What happened?” Diana asks.

“Barnes,” the man heaves. “He just- snapped. There was nothing I could do, I-”

“Where did he go?”, Rogers demands.

The man shakily points in a direction, and Rogers is gone before anyone can even blink.

Sam takes a talkie off of one of the guards’ unconscious bodies, and calls for a medic.

“Someone will be here soon,” he promises. “But we gotta go.”

Diana shoots the man one last look before she follows Sam out of the room. Why was he still conscious when everyone else wasn’t? How would he possibly not have been Bucky's first target? But there’s no time to ask questions, they have to find Bucky. 

It’s not hard to do so, seeing as he’s very publicly fighting himself out of the building through the lobby. Skirting around the last corner, the group arrives just in time to watch Bucky slam Natasha into a table.

With an almost feral speed, Sam is throwing himself at Bucky and throwing punches, but without his gear, he’s tragically no match for the Winter Soldier and is on the ground a moment later.

Diana dives into the fight herself and manages two blows at Bucky that would work to knock down any normal person, but before she can figure out a new strategy, there’s a metal fist swinging her way and she’s on the ground herself. Her head throbs. She thinks she might be bleeding, but she can’t be sure.

She barely registers the fight continuing beside her, but she can hear when it moves out of the room. 

When Diana pries her eyes open a minute or two later, she finds Sam walking over to where Nat is stirring. Natasha insists she’s fine, but Sam helps her up nonetheless and supports her first few steps. He then helps Diana up.

“Thanks,” she mutters.

Sam gives her a nod. “You okay?”

Diana thinks about it for a second, tries to feel if any of her injuries are major, but decides they aren’t. She might have a minor concussion, but that’s fine. She’s a demigoddess, she can handle it. 

She nods. “Where’s Rogers?”

“I don’t know,” Sam confesses. “He and Barnes disappeared.”

“You should too,” Natasha says briskly.

Diana and Sam exchange a look. They have to find Rogers and get the hell out of here. But really, they’re no good without their gear.

“I’ll get our stuff, you get Rogers.”

Sam frowns. “You sure you can get to it?”

“Well,” Diana thinks for a moment. “No. But I’m less likely to be recognized than you. And I have more years of stealth experience.”

Sam nods, then manages a small teasing smile. “What is it with you and Steve and weird flexes about being old?”

“You’re too young to understand.”

Sam squawks indignantly behind her as she slinks away, and she can’t help but smile. The fact that she’s not in this alone feels good, even though she has no idea how she’s going to get their gear without getting herself caught.

It turns out to be easier than she thought it would be, so she finds herself in a stolen Audi with all the gear only half an hour later. She drives it to the rendezvous point under Lutherbrücke like they agreed.

She waits for only two minutes until the others show up. Her relief is full bodied, the nerves uncoiling at seeing all three of them in one piece. It returns, albeit more mildly, when she finds that Bucky is unconscious in Rogers’ arms. They’re both soaking wet.

“What happened?”

Sam gives her a look. “They have a river kink.”

“Sam.” Rogers looks about two seconds from throwing a punch.

Diana huffs a laugh, but it’s more overwhelmed than it is amused. “Is Bucky okay?”

Rogers swallows and looks down at the figure in his arms. “He’s alive.”

“Okay. We can work with that.” It ends up sounding far less certain than she had intended it to.

‘Working with that’ apparently means dropping the Audi, stealing yet another car, and driving out of the city. They need a place to lay low, to regroup and make a plan. They need a place to safely wake Bucky.

Sam pulls off of the highway just past Potsdam and parks the car near some old warehouses that look abandoned. Luckily, they are.

Diana helps Rogers lift one of the rusted pieces of equipment to trap Bucky’s arm under -- the metal one so as not to hurt him, they hope -- and listens to him and Sam bicker about Rogers’ recklessness. They all change into their gear, not sure when the next fight will come to them.

The way Sam and Rogers bicker feels familiar, almost comforting. They have to craft a plan, though, so Diana interrupts them.

“Alright,” she starts. “Rogers has an infuriatingly non-existent sense of self-preservation, that’s not new. What is new is that we’re international fugitives. And that we’re on the run protecting an unconscious man that’s wanted all over the world for dozens of assassinations.”

They all stand in silence for a moment, the wind whistling around the corners of the warehouse. At least there’s no audible sign of anyone close to finding them yet.

“We can hide in plain sight,” Sam suggests. “Try and blend into busy places.”

“Everyone knows our faces,” Rogers counters. “Especially mine. And now Bucky’s.”

Diana frowns. “How well do people know his face?”

“Well enough to pick him out of a crowd in Bucharest. His face is on every program broadcast and every paper printed.”

Sam stares at the floor, then emits an almost slighting snort. “If your boy Barnes had done something that big scale earlier than we could have found him months ago.”

“Sam-”, Rogers starts, but Diana interrupts him.

“But Bucky didn’t want to be found.”

Sam frowns. “What are you saying?”

She thinks for a moment. “If the Winter Soldier is anything like what we’ve been told he is, public spectacles aren’t his M.O. and getting caught by security cameras definitely isn’t. If he didn’t want to be found, why bomb the U.N.? At the signing of the Sokovia Accords, nonetheless.”

“Someone framed him,” Rogers concludes. “Of course. He wasn’t even the Soldier when I found him in Bucharest.”

“Who would do that? And why? What’s the motive?” 

They come up with little to nothing.

Around them, the sounds of choppers are becoming more frequent, louder. Diana prays to the Gods that the old warehouse will conceal them, that they haven’t left any noticeable tracks.

They wait for a relatively silent fifteen minutes until Bucky stirs. Sam calls Rogers over from where he was watching the helicopters through an open doorway.

They all stand at a weary distance, not sure if Bucky will be himself or the Soldier when he fully regains consciousness. 

The brunet raises his head slowly and looks around in confusion. He tries to move, but finds his arm is trapped under the metal and frowns, slouches. Then he catches sight of Rogers.

“Steve,” he breathes.

Rogers’ hard eyes lighten, but he doesn’t move yet. “Which Bucky am I talking to?”

Bucky seems to consider his answer for a moment, doesn’t tear his eyes from the prolonged gaze at Rogers. 

“Your mom’s name was Sarah,” he says then. “You used to get charcoal stains all over the furniture but you wouldn’t even notice because you couldn’t see for shit.” Bucky huffs out a little laugh through his words.

Diana can’t help but smile and look to Rogers, but when she does, he’s already halfway across the room toward Bucky. He ends up crouched down, arms tight around his best friend and his face buried in the curve where Bucky’s neck meets his shoulder. The metal arm is still confined, but Bucky wraps his flesh arm around Rogers’ shoulders, first tentative, then gripping so hard at the material of the suit it looks like it might rip.

“Just like that we’re supposed to be cool?”

Diana swats Sam’s arm. The super-soldiers don’t move from their embrace.

“What did I do?”, Bucky asks quietly, as though he’s scared of the answer.

Rogers pulls back just enough to look at Bucky, moves a strand of the long, unkempt hair out of his face. He swallows. “Enough.”

Bucky hangs his head. “Fuck. I knew this would happen. Everything HYDRA put in me still there, all he had to do was say the goddamn words.”

Rogers stills. “Who?”

“The, uh- The guy that was questioning me.”

Rogers turns to Diana and Sam with an expression of pure horror, then back to Bucky. “What did he want?”

Bucky shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Diana steps forward. “People are dead, Barnes. The bombing, the setup, the guy did all that just to get ten minutes with you. We’re going to need you to do better than I don’t know.”

Bucky stares at Diana for a moment, at her golden armor and hard stare, then looks to Rogers. Neither of them say a word, but they must have communicated somehow because Bucky lets out a breath and looks back to her.

“He-” Bucky hesitates, thinks again. “He wanted to know about Siberia. About where I was kept. And about some mission report, I don’t remember which one.”

“Why would he want to know where you were kept?”, Rogers asks.

“Because I’m not the only Winter Soldier.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The drive to Leipzig-Halle Airport is about an hour and a half, and Diana feels like her heart is about to beat out of her chest the entire way. Sam is driving to her left, and she would urge him to drive faster, except that the last thing they need right now is to bring more attention to themselves, even if there are technically no speed limits on German highways.

Rogers and Bucky are sat in the back, pressed together from shoulder to knee. Diana suspects that they would be nothing short of on top of each other if they were alone and almost tells them that they needn't stop on her account, but then decides to keep quiet. It would probably only fluster them enough to scooch apart entirely.

Over the roar of the motor, Diana can’t understand what the pair are saying behind her, but she can hear the quiet exchange of words. She can’t even imagine the depth of what they’re feeling right now, not really. Her heart soars for them, though she knows that their reunion is fragile at best.

She shoots Wanda and Clint an encrypted text asking for backup and tries to distract herself by paging through the map she found in the glove compartment of the car, which only sort of works.

When they arrive in the parking deck in Leipzig-Halle, there’s already a car there. They pull up beside it, and Clint and Wanda climb out. They’re both still in their civilian clothing.

“Well, this all went to shit really fast,” Clint remarks as they get out of the car.

“You’re tellin’ me,” Sam quips.

Rogers steps toward Wanda. “You’re okay?”

She nods, and he strokes a large hand up and down her arm and squeezes it before letting go. Bucky walks over to him and hands him the shield from the trunk.

Rogers smiles, takes the shield on his arm. “Right, uh. This is Bucky. Buck, this is Clint and Wanda.”

Bucky gives them a nod and a slightly tight smile, which Clint returns. 

Wanda grins. “Nice to meet you.”

Because her text was vague at best, Diana begins explaining their situation. They need to get to Siberia as soon as they can. They’re not quite sure what’s on the line, but with the men Bucky described, everything could be.

Clint and Wanda suit up, while Diana, Sam, Rogers, and Bucky, chart the fastest way to get to Siberia without getting caught. The chopper Clint brought promises to be quiet, but they can’t afford to take any more risks than they already are.

Just when they’re ready to go and Rogers looks about to give his best motivational speech à-la-Cap, the airport P.A. rings out in the parking deck.

_“Dies ist eine Notsituation,_ ” it announces. _“Alle Passagiere müssen den Flughafen sofort evakuieren._ ”

Diana, who spent some time in Munich in the nineties, is about to translate, but Bucky beats her to it. 

“They’re evacuating the airport.”

Rogers sighs. 

“Stark,” Sam infers.

Clint visibly tightens his hold on his bow. “Oh, boy.”

‘Oh, boy’ was right. 

Rogers runs out first, hoping to get to the chopper without detection, but no such luck. He’s almost immediately faced with Stark and Rhodey. They all watch from their vantage point as Tony and Rogers argue and T’Challa and Nat join the argument.

Seeing as the chopper that was their way out has been rendered useless by Stark, Wanda and Sam take off to find the quinjet they know is kept at this airport.

Then, suddenly, Tony calls out for something and Rogers’ shield is ripped from his arm. Bucky tenses, and Diana gently lays a hand on his shoulder to stop him from recklessly running out there to save Rogers’ ass. A masked figure in a tight red suit, Stark design by the looks of it, lands gracefully on a structure with the shield in hand.

They all stare for a moment, confused. It seems as though Stark has recruited additional backup. 

“Found it,” Sam says through the coms. “There’s a quinjet in Hangar 5, North Runway.”

Rogers lifts his hands, bound together by some sort of white material, and Clint shoots an arrow straight through it without hesitation. Diana admires not for the first time the precision of his aim. 

That starts the fight. 

Clint shoots another arrow to stun the figure in red and then Rogers has his shield back. Stark and Rhodey seem to spot Wanda and Sam and are flying toward them a moment later. Because of Clint’s arrows, the initially good hiding spot he, Diana, and Bucky are in is revealed rather quickly, and then the Black Panther is leaping toward the airport building in bounds. Rogers holds him back, but with Nat and the Red Guy against him, Diana sees no other choice than to throw herself into the fight.

She lands in front of Nat. 

“So much for helping us find Bucky.”

Nat gives her a measured stare and shifts into a fighting stance. “If we don’t bring you in, they will. And I’m sure they’ll be much less friendly about it.”

Natasha charges, and Diana dodges a hard kick, but finds herself on the floor with Nat on top of her a moment later. “You call that friendly?” She pushes Nat off and stands, delivers a few hits of her own.

Then, her hands are suddenly confined by spider webs, except that they’re _strong_. She can’t move them. “What the-”

Red Guy swings past her, hanging on to the white material that must be the strong spider webs like Tarzan on a vine. 

Nat smirks. “We have a new recruit.”

“So do we.”

And then Bucky shoots a stunning bullet perfectly into the crook of Nat’s knee from where he is more than a hundred meters away. The guy could really give Clint a run for his money. 

They fight on.

Diana manages to pull Red Guy out of the sky mid-swing when he’s about to go for Rogers, who’s still dealing with a very determined T’Challa, and renders Nat temporarily immobile with a particularly accurate hit, but without a clear way to the quinjet, the fight is lost.

Through the coms, she can hear that Sam and Wanda are still struggling with Stark, and Rhodey is cornering Clint. It isn’t until a particularly strong burst of red light from the terminal and a perfectly timed combination of shots from Clint and Bucky, that the team gets a window to get to the quinjet.

They take it gratefully, gathering on the tarmac as they run to the hangar. They sprint, already feeling like they might get away with this afterall, when a burst of light draws a hot line on the concrete in front of them and they skid to a stop.

Vision hovers above the scene. He’s an imposing presence always, but now, ten meters above them with a glowing stone in his forehead and a billowing cape, he’s particularly striking.

“Captain Rogers,” he says in his usual calm but authoritative way. “I know you believe what you’re doing is right. But for the collective good, you must surrender now.”

He floats down slowly to land a distance away in front of them. Stark and Natasha appear beside him, followed by Rhodey, T’Challa, and Red Guy.

The teams stand opposed, six to six, the air bristling between them. They all know that neither will stand down.

“What do we do now, Cap?,” Sam asks.

Rogers squares his jaw, pulls the strap of his shield tighter. 

“We fight.”

And that they do.

It’s strange, Diana thinks, to be fighting against those she’s usually fighting with. Mostly because she’s not trying to significantly harm them, let alone _kill_ them, and they’re not trying to kill her. Also, she knows most of these people and their strategies, so in that way she has an advantage. Then again, most of them also know hers.

She battles Nat for a while, then Rhodey, then T’Challa. She delivers a few blows to Vision, though his only real opponent seems to be Wanda because their power sources are compatible, despite the fact that no one really understands them. Each of her opponents gives her a hard time, but she gives back best she can and manages to stay in one piece.

At some point, there’s a gash in her thigh and she thinks her wrist might be badly sprained, but she doesn’t really have time to deal with all that when Rhodey is shooting at her and she’s simultaneously dodging a kick from T’Challa.

Somehow, miraculously, they manage to create enough of a diversion so that Rogers and Bucky can escape the fray to get the quinjet. 

Diana can’t tell exactly what goes down as T’Challa and Nat follow the pair behind the collapsed tower, but when the quinjet flies out of the hangar with only Rogers and Bucky on it, she has a general idea.

The fight on the ground momentarily stops to watch as Tony and Rhodey follow the aircraft, Sam on their tail. They all disappear from sight, and Diana turns back to the remaining superheroes.

Red Guy is on the ground, conscious but exhausted. Clint stands a few feet away from him, still in a fighting stance from when he was in combat with Tony. Wanda and Vision stand beside one and another across the tarmac. 

T’Challa emerges from the rubble in front of the hangar with Natasha in front of him. He’s holding her in an arresting grip, and Diana’s suspicions are confirmed.

Knowing Nat, she could escape T’Challa’s grip, but she isn’t. She looks at the exhausted heroes with her head held high, but no doubt in a position of surrender.

Vision makes a move to grip Wanda, and she fights him for only about a second before she lets herself be confined. Clint drops his bow, takes off his arrows. 

And Diana- 

She hesitates. She could run, but where to? And to what end? She doesn't know how to fly a plane, in fact, she doesn't feel particularly keen on ever piloting one, and doesn't know how else she could make it to Siberia undetected. She’s out of options.

So, she drops the lasso. Diana yields.

  
  
  
  
  


She doesn’t hear from Rogers until two weeks after that whole debacle.

Diana knows only the jist of what happened after the departure of the quinjet, that Tony went to help Rogers and Bucky after he found out about the framing, but that he ended up coming back to the compound severely beaten up, without Rogers and Bucky and with the shield in hand. Rogers and Bucky were not pardoned. He didn’t answer Diana’s inquiries, but she can’t blame him for not wanting to speak to her after everything that happened.

Initially, Diana and the others that fought alongside Rogers were imprisoned in dystopian looking cells. After three days, they each got deals, some worse than others.

Wanda and Sam remained confined, rendered too radical or dangerous to be walking free, though Diana hears that they got broken out of the prison only a few days after they were put in it. The government won’t say so, of course, but Diana is certain it was Rogers.

She and Clint agreed to retire and were injected with trackers, as if that’s warranted. She gives up Hestia’s Lasso and her armor, the armbands included, even though she likes to wear those even when she’s not actively fighting.

Her forearms feel bare, and Diana can feel the bump of the tracker under the skin on the nape of her neck. She wants badly to cut it out, but if she does so, she becomes an internationally wanted fugitive again, and that’s the last thing she wants to be. 

With her secret identity crumbling, Diana reluctantly leaves Paris. The people there know her too well, and now that her face has been in the news once or twice, she’s already gotten two curious texts from co-workers. It breaks her heart to leave, she’s come to love the city so dearly, but she’s been there too long anyway.

So, she goes to Rome, to a job at the Borghese and admittedly amazing Pizza. Her Italian is still decent from Venice in the 60s, and her co-workers are nice. They don’t seem to recognize her from the Avengers, so she settles in her new apartment with a view over the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele with something close to content.

She unpacks her boxes in her already partly furnished rooms and hangs her favorite art on the walls; Renoir in the living room, Cezanne in the hallway, Valadon in the bedroom. She hangs one of Rogers’ sketches of the view from her balcony in Paris over her desk, and wonders if he’s okay, where he is, if Bucky’s safe.

She places Steve’s watch on the cabinet in her bedroom.

A week after that, while making fried rice in her new kitchen, her phone rings. Diana picks up her phone from the counter, frowns at the incoming facetime call from an unknown number. 

Hoping it’s not a stalker or supervillain, she swipes up and is greeted with ocean eyes and a familiar smile. She nearly drops the phone in the pan.

“Rogers.” She laughs in full-bodied relief.

“Hey, Di.”

“What- Are you okay? Is Bucky? Where are you guys? What happened with the Soldiers and Stark?”

Rogers huffs out a laugh at her plethora of questions, but he complies. “I’m okay. So is Bucky. We were both a little banged up after Siberia, but we’re healing. T’Challa actually granted us asylum, so we’re in Wakanda now. The Soldiers weren’t a threat. Zemo, the guy posing as a U.N. psychiatrist, had killed them by the time we got there, they were just bait. The goal was to put Tony and I at odds, which I would say was successful.”

Diana feels some of the tension flow out of her body at the reassurance that her friends are okay. Then, she frowns. “I’m very glad you’re okay. Three questions; Why is T’Challa granting you guys asylum when he was trying to kill Bucky before? Who was Zemo and what was his motive? And what happened between you and Tony?”

Rogers indulges her. He answers her questions briefly, if not in too much detail, but she can’t say she blames him for not wanting to relive the trauma. She gets the gist nonetheless.

“What about you?”, Rogers asks then. “You weren’t in the jail I broke Wanda and Sam out of. Were you able to strike a deal or are you on the run?”

“I knew you were the one that broke them out,” she grins. “And, the former. I don’t have my gear, and I now have a tracker in my neck.”

Rogers is visibly disturbed. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah. But it’s fine, better than being a fugitive, I guess. I moved to Rome now, so that means no more Louvre for now.”

Adorably, Rogers pouts, and Diana laughs. He smiles. “Why Rome?”

“I haven’t lived here yet and it’s a gorgeous city. Plus, I was able to get a position at the Borghese and I know Italian.”

“I hope you love it there.”

“Thank you.” She turns the heat off under the rice and sits down at the dining table. “How’s Wakanda?”

“Incredible,” Rogers starts. “I don’t actually know if I’m allowed to tell you this, but th-”

He’s interrupted by another voice on his end of the line and looks up past the camera. Diana can’t really make out what the other voice is saying or who it is, but judging by the warm look on Rogers’ face, it’s Bucky.

She’s right, confirms it when Bucky appears beside Rogers’ face and gives the camera a slightly awkward little wave and thanks Diana for her help, apologizes for the trouble she’s surely in now.

She tells him it’s nothing, that she’s glad he’s okay.

Bucky leaves the room a moment later, and Rogers turns back to the camera with a dopey smile.

“I’m glad you have Bucky back,” Diana tells him, and Rogers blushes.

“Me too.”

Diana just watches him for a moment, the twinkle in his eyes and the curve of his lips. Then, the truth washes over her with a startling clarity. “You love him.”

“Of course I love him,” Rogers says quickly. “He’s my best friend.”

“No,” Diana urges. “You _love_ him. You’re _in love_ with him.”

Rogers’ brow furrows. “What? No, I’m not. It’s just-” He falters.

“It’s just what?”

“We’re-” He adjusts the phone, switches it to his other hand. “We’re friends.”

“But you love him. And that’s okay.” 

Rogers frowns. He opens his mouth to argue again, but no sound comes out.

Diana leans back in her seat and tucks her right leg under her left. Rogers needs some time to figure it out, come to terms with it, so she doesn’t press.

Instead, she gently changes the topic to a safer one, tells Rogers about the pieces in the Borghese. It works well to distract, though she can tell that Rogers is still pondering her words.

And then, almost two weeks later, Diana is awoken by the ping of her phone.

_Rogers: I’m in love with Bucky._

She smiles and sends him two emojis back: a red heart, and a pride flag.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤️️🏳️🌈


	4. thanos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> petition for chris evans and anthony mackie to suit up and escort him out of the white house themselves.

Rogers calls her on his burner phone a few weeks after that. 

He’s just off a covert mission in Sienna, he explains, and there’s no other trails to follow currently. Plus, he’s tired of third wheeling Nat and Sam (“Oh my gods, have they finally stopped dancing around one and another?” “No, and it’s exhausting.”)

So, he shows up at the door of her Monti apartment in his most inconspicuous civilian clothing: a navy hoodie and some dark gray jeans, black cap pulled low over his eyes.

“You have a beard,” she remarks after a moment.

Rogers shrugs. “Thought it might help me look less like Cap.”

“With those shoulders?”, Diana smirks. “I don’t think so.”

Rogers blushes and pushes past her into the hall. “It took you a moment.”

“Oh, no,” she tells him. “I recognized you immediately. I was just admiring the beard.”

He blushes,  _ again _ , and takes off his cap. “Can I get a glass of water or are you just going to keep flirting with me?”

Diana laughs, apologizes, and leads him into the kitchen. “You just make it way too easy, Rogers.”   
  


He takes a glass from her. “You’d think I’d get used to it.”

“You’d think.”

Unable to take him to the Borghese, Diana shows him some of the pieces that are currently being curated or restored digitally and lets him scroll through the pages. He smiles when he recognizes works or artists or motifs and lets Diana geek out over the pieces he doesn’t know. She’s so glad that he’s an art nerd, too.

Later that evening, sprawled out on Diana’s couch and filled with Thai takeout, they drink Pinot Grigio and listen to Fleetwood Mac.

So far, they’ve been talking about Harry Potter, but as the room grows increasingly darker and the streetlights outside take over what was once the sun’s illumination, Diana breaches the topic she was previously avoiding.

“How are you faring?”

Rogers takes a moment to catch on to the fact that she’s genuinely asking. He considers his answer. “Okay, all things considered. Laying low sucks, but I have Nat, Sam, Wanda, and you. And Bucky’s safe.”

“Where is he?”, she asks. “Bucky, I mean. Why is he not out here with you?”

“He’s in cryo freeze right now.”

“ _ What? _ ”, Diana exclaims. “You’re counting cryo freeze as asylum? I thought you-”

“It was his choice,” Rogers cuts in. “Hyrda put some fucking  _ triggers _ in his brain and he doesn't trust his own mind. Shuri, the princess -- smart as a whip, rivals Banner -- she’s working on removing them. He’ll be out when he’s safe.”

Diana takes a moment to process this. “I understand that that’s shitty for you, and I’m sorry.”

Rogers sighs and smiles up at her through his frankly ridiculous lashes. “Thank you. I know it’s what Bucky needs, even if I hate it.”

“Have you told him how you feel?”, she finds herself asking. 

Shaking his head, Rogers answers. “No. He has enough on his plate right now.”

“Well,” Diana tries. “Maybe your confession would be welcome.”

After all that Bucky went through, all he suffered, and all he overcame because of Rogers, Diana has no doubt in his mind that he loves Rogers just as much as Rogers loves him. Now, all these hundred year old men need to do is get their heads out of their asses. 

Rogers shakes his head. “He needs time.”

She knows not to press. Besides, he might be right.

They fall into a companionable silence, listening to the voices of couples walking home outside and to the steady tick of Diana’s grandfather clock in the dining room. Suddenly, minutes in, Rogers breaks the silence.

“Tell me about him.”

Diana startles. “Who?”

“Your Steve.”

She turns to Rogers, her mind running a mile a minute. How does he know? Who told him?  _ Is _ there a record of her relationship to Steve Trevor?

“Relax, Di. No one told me. I just,” Rogers gestures vaguely, “figured it out, I guess.”

“Gods,” Diana scoffs. “Am I that transparent?”   
  


“No. But you avoid my name like the plague and I know what grief looks like.”

She nods, and has to swallow past a sudden lump in her throat. 

Rogers waits, lets her gather her thoughts. Diana knows that if she really didn’t want to talk about Steve, Rogers wouldn’t make her. But after all she knows about his life, about Peggy, about  _ Bucky _ , can’t she trust him? She wants to. So, she takes the leap.

“He was amazing,” she confesses softly. “See, before Steve, I thought that man was this perfect creature, and that everything bad you ever did was because of the gods, Ares mostly. Which, I know that sounds ridiculous now, even to me, but it was all I’d been told.”

She pauses. A car starts across the street, and the neighbor's dog barks. Rogers says nothing.

“And I was so angry when I found out that humans are fickle and power-hungry and flawed,” she continues, “but Steve showed me that they’re capable of so much beauty and kindness and  _ love _ . He was just as unsure and imperfect as anyone, but he’s the best man I’ve ever known.”

Rogers smiles warmly. “He sounds wonderful.”

Diana nods. Her eyes are a little foggy. “He would have liked you, I think.”

They sit in silence for a moment. Rogers lifts her hand from her lap and takes it in both of his. One of his long, calloused fingers runs lazy circles over her knuckles. The dog barks again.

“He was a pilot in the Great War, worked for British intelligence but was actually from just outside Cleveland,” she explains. This isn’t the important part of course, but she feels Rogers should get some sort of backstory. She adds, “He liked Dickens and cider and cooking, which he said he was good at, but I never got any evidence.”

Rogers laughs a little and smiles.

“Was he hot?”

Diana looks up with a scandalized expression, but can’t help but bark out a laugh, albeit a watery one. “Rogers! What happened to your tact?”

Rogers shrugs, grinning. “It was a ruse and you know it.”

She rolls her eyes and frees her hand of his own to swat at him with it.

“Now answer the question.”

“You want me to tell you if my dead lover was hot?” Diana tries for deadpan, but can’t help her smile.

“Obviously.”

She takes a deep, exasperated breath. “Yes, he was hot. I didn’t really know it much at the time, seeing as he was the first man I had ever seen, but,  _ gods, _ yes. After walking among men for nearly a century I can confirm that Steve Trevor was an absolute specimen.”

Rogers laughs. “Just your luck that the first man you ever see is so attractive.”

Diana hums, equally amused. She ponders her next words, but decides to throw caution to the wind. “You actually reminded me of him a lot, at first,” she confesses. “When you lowered your shield during the Battle of New York. I thought you were him for a moment. It’s what drew me to you, probably.”

Rogers’ expression turns somewhere between concerned and curious.

“You share the blond hair and blue eyes,” she clarifies. “And the jawline that could cut diamonds. I have a type, clearly.”

Just as she had hoped, Rogers blushes a lovely shade of red. After all the years as Captain America, his continued unawareness of his own looks is one of the many things Diana loves about him. In another world, one where they both weren’t in love with other people, she thinks he could’ve been the one.

Diana takes another sip of her wine. “Not to mention your shared inclination for suicide missions in airplanes.”

The bashful blush on Rogers’ face morphs into a somber frown. “Is that how he went?”

Eyes fogging up anew, Diana nods. “November 10th, 1918. The sky above a German army base in east Belgium. I’d only known him a month and a half.”

“Fuck.”

Diana huffs out a watery laugh. “And he told me he loved me, when we were on that runway, but it was so loud and my ears were ringing and I didn’t understand what he was saying until later, so I never- I didn’t get a chance to say it back.” A tear falls in earnest then.

Rogers takes her hand, and she grabs on to it gratefully.

“He saved countless lives with what he did,” she continues. “He’s a hero. And I’m fine. I can deal with his loss, really.”

“But you shouldn’t have to.”

Wiping the wet from her cheek with her free hand, Diana smiles up at Rogers. She adds that hand, now a little tear stained, to the intertwined ones on the couch.

“Neither should you,” she whispers into the space between them.

Rogers’ eyebrows draw up into a frown. “What do you mean?”

“Bucky.”

Rogers tenses. “Bucky’s death wasn’t a heroic sacrifice, Di.” He sounds pained, like the words physically hurt him. “He suffered for decades, and he didn’t save anyone.”

“He saved you.”

His shoulders slump. She watches as his eyes fill with tears to match hers.

Rogers glares at her half-heartedly and wipes at his eye with the sleeve of his shirt. “Now you’ve fucking made me cry too.”

Diana laughs another watery laugh and feels the waterworks building up behind her own eyes. “Come here.”

Rogers complies just as he begins to cry in earnest.

Diana pulls his large body onto her lap and runs a hand through his hair. A tear runs down her cheek to match the ones wetting the thighs of her leggings, and she lets it fall, lets herself and the man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders set it down, let it out.

Minutes pass like that, both of them crying -- Diana hopelessly, Rogers desperately. The clock keeps ticking, even though Diana thinks it shouldn't. After taking so much from them, time should give them a moment to grieve.

It doesn’t.

The pendulum keeps swinging, the moths keep gathering around the streetlights, and the couples keep walking by the house.

After what could have been hours or minutes or anything in between, Rogers’ heaving breaths fade into sniffles and he straightens, apologizing sheepishly.

“I started it,” she tells him. “ Besides, I think we both needed that.”

Rogers nods, and they go to bed. 

That night, she dreams of Steve and his starlit eyes, and the snow falling around them as they dance on that small, destroyed square in Veld. But just as she leans in to pull him closer, kiss him, press his body to hers and feel the heat of his skin through the layers of fabric, he disappears without a trace. No goodbye, no chance to say she loves him back.

  
  
  


Diana sees Rogers twice more over the span of the next year, once with Nat and Sam in tow, but mostly, it’s radio silence. It’s understandable, seeing as he’s constantly on the run and even her deal doesn’t let her communicate with him openly, but it is a bit lonely.

In a promise to Rogers, Diana does make another friend, though. Francesca is her neighbor, and although Diana can’t really be open about everything in her life with her, it’s nice to have someone to text about bad Netflix movies and invite over for dinner. 

She also finds it absolutely hilarious that Francesca has a giant celebrity crush on Captain America, and has no idea that Diana knows him, has  _ kissed  _ him. Heck, she doesn’t even know exactly why he’s an internationally wanted fugitive and is mad at the Accords just for denying her Steve Rogers content. 

She makes Diana laugh.

Francesca is also the first person to text her when a giant donut-shaped spaceship appears in New York in September 2018. 

_ [Picture attached] _

_ This is crazy and terrifying _

_ Kinda makes you wish Captain Hot-Ass was still an Avenger, doesn’t it? _

_ It really does. _

  
  


Diana switches text chains to a much dryer, less-frequently visited one and types out a frantic message.

_ Let me know you’re okay. Call if you need it and I’ll be there. _

There’s no response for two hours. 

Diana tries to busy herself with the logistics of the coming shipment of paintings and the new  _ Wombats _ album, but it doesn't really work. She’s just beginning to wonder if she should just suit up and risk going out alone when her phone screen lights up.

_ Rogers: I’m okay. We had a run-in of our own. Where can we pick you up? _

She sends him some coordinates and goes to the bedroom to change.

When the quinjet lands beside her out on a field north of Rome half an hour later, she jogs toward it anxiously. The door opens with a mechanical whirr, and Rogers steps into the dim light of the moon.

She lets out a breath and goes to hug him, grips at the coarse material of his suit. 

He hugs her back just as tightly.

“What the hell is going on?”, she asks him when they pull back.

“We’re not quite sure,” he admits, “but I think we’re gonna have to get as much of the team as we can back together.”

She swallows, and follows him back into the quinjet.

Diana greets her friends with a hug, gives Vision a cordial nod because she doesn’t know him really at all. It seems Wanda has taken a liking to him, though, considering how close they’re sitting, huddled together in the wake of the fight Nat briefly describes the lot of them fighting. She’s glad they’ve found solace in one and another.

“Where to, Cap?”, Sam asks once they’re all settled in.

Rogers squares his shoulders. “Home.”

Diana’s not entirely certain what that entails, but she reckons she’ll find out soon enough. 

Rogers is now crouched beside Wanda and Vision, checking the frankly ghastly wound in Vision’s torso. He’s fizzling in and out of focus, and Diana has to look away.

She joins Nat at the rear end of the ship, staring out of the back window.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Diana jokes weakly, and coaxes a chuckle out of Nat.

“Tell me about it.”

They both watch as the jet is suddenly encompassed in clouds and the lights of the cities and towns disappear below them.

Nat turns from the window and leans against the wall. “How are you? In Rome?”

Diana almost laughs at the mundanity of the question. “Just fine,” she smiles. “The Borghese is lovely and the food is  _ delicious _ . And I even made a friend.”

With a grin, Nat turns to her. “That’s great. Do they know about...?” She trails off and motions at Diana in her gear.

“No,” she answers with a shake of her head. “Which is good, I think.”

Nat makes an affirmative sound.

“But then sometimes I get really close to telling her when she won’t shut up about her crush on Captain America.”

A laugh bubbles out of Natasha’s throat suddenly, and Diana can’t help but join in.

“I mean,” Nat turns to where Steve and Sam are trying to fix the intercom, “I  _ understand _ .”

“Oh, definitely.”

They both watch as Rogers and Sam bicker over the wiring and half heartedly toss rude insults at one another. Diana may be in love with a dead man, but she’s not  _ blind _ . They’re both beautiful, and she watches them and their gesticulations and smiles and realizes how much she’s come to love them.

Against all odds, this ragtag group of superheroes that saved New York City from a bunch of aliens in 2012 have become her family. 

She looks over at Nat to find her with a warm, almost intimate little smile on her face.

“Falcon’s cute too, through, right?”, Diana asks.

The warm expression is quickly replaced as Nat turns to her with a practiced nonchalance. “I’m sorry?”

Diana scoffs. “Oh, come on. You and Sam have been dancing around each other for, what, three years?”

Nat averts her gaze back to the guys. “That’s not true.”

“Nat.”

“Diana.”

“He’s clearly just waiting for you to make the final move.”

She tenses incrementally, and then turns to Diana with an almost cold gaze. “Black Widows don’t do relationships.”

Diana ponders this. “Sure,” she agrees. “But maybe Natasha Romanov does.”

Nat opens, and then closes her mouth, and is then saved by a beep by the quinjet. It’s unfamiliar to Diana, for obvious reasons, but Natasha seems to know what it means and takes off to check the controls.

These superheroes all need to learn to be upfront with their feelings, really. 

Three and a half tired hours later, the quinjet begins to descend.

The Avengers facility in upstate New York would not have been Diana’s first guess for what Rogers meant by ‘home’, but she assumes it’s more symbolic than anything else. The Avengers were never home to him, not really, but they represented his legacy in the 21st century, his life before everything went so spectacularly off the rails. It represents stability, and it represents what Captain America was to the American people, and the world.

Now, Rogers looks almost paradoxical to the stark lines of the modern building, like he’s negating its marble floors and glass walls by just being there. Nat, Wanda. Vision, Sam, and Diana trail behind him in support, and because there’s an unspoken agreement that he’s their leader. They follow where Rogers goes.

They find Rhodey in one of the conference rooms on the second floor, in a virtual holographic meeting with the World Security Council. He’s standing across from Secretary Ross in an argumentative stance when the elevator doors open and they step into the room.

Both Rhodey and Ross turn to the newcomers in surprise, though one is far more pleasant than the other.

“Mr. Secretary,” Rogers greets.

Secretary Ross walks up to him with a nearly predatory gaze. “You’ve got some nerve,” he starts coldly. “I’ll give you that.”

Nat gives him a practiced stare. “You could use some of that right now.”

“The world’s on fire,” Ross goes on, ignoring Nat’s comment, “and you think all is forgiven?”

Diana steels herself, but Rogers looks almost menacingly calm.

“I’m not asking for forgiveness, and I’m way past asking permission.”

If the world could see him now, Diana thinks -- The Unwavering Patriot, The American Icon, The Perfect Soldier -- they wouldn’t recognize him in their crafted image. She’s immeasurably proud of him.

“Earth just lost your best defender,” Rogers continues evenly, “So we’re here to fight. And if you want to stand in our way, we’ll fight you too.”

Ross just stares for a moment, squares his jaw, and then turns to Rhodey. He orders for them to be arrested, and Rhodey gives an affirmative before he abruptly ends the call and comes to stand in front of the remaining half of the team.

For just a moment, Diana fears she’s going to have to fight him again, but then Rhodey’s tired face breaks out into a smile.

“Good to see you, Cap.”

Rogers’ shoulders relax. “Good to see you too, Rhodey.”

Nat steps forward to give Rhodey a one-armed hug, and Rhodey is grinning once they pull back.

“Wow,” he utters. “You guys really look like crap. Must’ve been a rough couple years.”

Sam’s lips quirk up at the corners. “Well, the hotels weren’t exactly five star.”

“Well, I think you look great,” another voice quips, and they all turn to see Bruce Banner emerge from the next room.

Holy shit.

No one has seen him in three years, not since he flew away on that untrackable quinjet after Sokovia, still as Hulk. Now, he’s himself, and is smiling at the lot of them a little sheepishly.

At varying speeds, the lot of them break out in relieved smiles and greet him warmly. Diana had almost forgotten how nice it was to have that friendly face around.

They get Vision situated in a medical bay, and Bruce puts him under radiation that lessens his pain. Diana has no idea how any of it works.

And as they wait for the painkillers to take effect so that Bruce can take a closer look at the wound, they try to figure out what they’re fighting.

As it turns out, Bruce was in New York when the donut descended, and was part of the fight that dispelled it. Stark was there, along with the Spider-kid from the airport, and a new guy -- Bruce called him Dr. Strange.

“Where are they now?”, Rogers demands.

Bruce hangs his head almost guiltily. “On the donut, I think.”

“They’re in  _ space _ ?” Rhodey asks incredulously. His tone is one of a man who has just about had it with all this superhero shit, and in any other scenario Diana would find it hilarious.

Now, though, the tension in the room is worried and apprehensive.

Rogers swallows, “What do the aliens want?”

“They’re working for Thanos, and he wants the infinity stones. He’s already bigger than anything we’ve faced, and if he gets them all, Strange says he’ll have more power than any of us can even begin to imagine.”

A silence engulfs the group. None of them know exactly what that means, but it sure as hell doesn’t sound good.

Natasha crosses her arms. “And do we know what and where these stones are exactly?”

“I believe,” Vision says faintly from the adjacent table, “that  _ this _ ” -- he motions at the glowing yellow stone embedded in his forehead-- “may be one of them.”

Bruce nods.

“Well then we have to protect it,” Diana states.

The others nod around her, but Vision sits up with a wince.

“No,” he says gravely, “We have to destroy it.” 

He gets up fully, ignoring Wanda’s motions to lie back down. “I’ve been giving a good deal of thought to this entity in my head. Its nature, but also its composition. I think if it were exposed to a sufficiently powerful energy source, something very similar to its own signature, perhaps, its molecular integrity could fail.”

Throughout this little speech he’s walking toward Wanda, toward his now evident love, almost pointedly. He’s speaking to her.

The realization of his suggestion comes to Diana seemingly at the same time that it does to Wanda. 

“Yeah, and you with it. We’re not having this conversation.”

Vision continues in a whisper to her, a plea. “Eliminating the stone is the only way to be certain Thanos can’t get to it.”

“That’s too high a price,” Wanda breathes.

Vision shakes his head, tenderly holds her head between his hands. “Only you have the power to pay it.”

Wanda looks almost insulted as she turns out of his grip and stalks to the edge of the room. 

It’s an impossible sacrifice to have to make.

But Vision turns to all of them and raises his voice. “Thanos threatens the fate of the universe. One life cannot stand in the way of defeating him.”

“But it should.” Rogers has his Captain America voice on. “We don’t trade lives, Vision.”

“Captain, seventy years ago you laid down your life to save how many millions of people, why is this any different?”

Rogers sighs, but looks to be gearing up for another argument when he’s interrupted.

“Because you might have another choice.”

All eyes turn to Bruce as he timidly walks up to the arguing pair, placating hand aloft.

“Your mind is made up of a complex construct of overlays -- JARVIS, Ultron, Tony, me the stone -- all of them mixed together, all of them learning from one and another.”

Wanda steps back into the light of the room. “You’re saying Vision isn’t just the stone.”

“I’m saying,” Bruce continues, “that if we take out the stone, there’s still a whole lot of Vision left. Perhaps, the best parts.”

Natasha asks the question circulating in all of their minds. “Can we do that?”

To their distress, Bruce shakes his head. “Not me. Not here.”

“I know somewhere.”

At that, all eyes are on Rogers.

  
  


Even after hearing about Wakanda from Rogers, Diana is not prepared for the sight before her when the quinjet disappears through the trees and emerges amidst a city. It looks like something straight out of a futuristic movie with tall glistening buildings and beautiful statues and reflecting pools of water. There is an undeniably urban air around the place, but it is so much clearer, so much  _ cleaner _ than Diana is used to.

The fact that this place exists so sheltered from the rest of the world almost reminds her of home.

Rogers had called ahead, so the quinjet lands easily on a designated spot.

A number of figures come up to greet them as they step out of the ship, one of them Diana recognizes to be T’Challa.

“Seems like I’m always thanking you for something,” Steve tells him cordially.

T’Challa smiles and shakes his hand. “It’s good to see you again, Captain. And the rest of you too.”

He hasn’t seen Diana, or probably most of them, since the airport fight, but he seems not to want to linger on the past. 

The group begins to walk toward one of the large buildings, Vision leaning on Wanda.

“How large of an assault should we be expecting?”, T’Challa asks.

Bruce steps forward a little clumsily. “Sir, I think you should expect quite a big assault.”

“How are we looking?” Natasha is all business.

“You will have my King’s Guard,” T’Challa answers evenly, “the border tribes, a few enlisted volunteers, and-”

“A semi-stable hundred year old man,” a voice smiles, and Diana turns to see Bucky before them.

He looks much healthier than when she saw him in Germany, and there’s a softness to his features she almost recognizes from Rogers’ sketch of him. He has a new, black and golden metal arm and is in fighting gear, but the flowy hair and easy stance almost negate it. He looks well.

Rogers goes to hug him immediately, holding him tight for just a second too long. Bucky grips him back just as tightly, and buries his face in Rogers’ shoulder.

Natasha and Diana exchange a look.

“How’ve you been, Buck?”, Rogers grins as they pull back.

Bucky smiles back easily. “Not bad, for the end of the world.”

Rogers’ grin widens, and he reaches up to Bucky’s cheek for just a short second before he lets it fall away with a dusting of pink on his cheeks.

Diana doesn’t think she’s ever seen anyone roll their eyes as dramatically as Sam does then. She supresses a laugh.

Bucky greets the rest of them with a little wave. His smile is warm, but there’s a timidness to him, an almost guilty fear of rejection. 

To try and still his anxiety, Diana makes sure to shoot him an extra warm smile even as the group begins to move again. Almost to her surprise, he grins back just as brightly.

Wanda, Bruce, and Vision go inside with some of the guards in order to start the procedure to remove the stone and the rest of them are left to talk strategy.

They’re expecting an assault, a giant one at that, and need to gear up. Their main objective is to keep Vision and Wanda safe and out of the fight long enough so that the stone can be removed and destroyed. They need to keep the aliens occupied.

Rogers, because he doesn’t have his shield, gets a frankly badass-looking Wakandan alternative, and Bruce, who reveals that Hulk has somehow decided not to appear, is fashioned with a hulk sized iron-man-like suit. He’s adorably excited about it.

They’re just leaving the building, ready to head to where T’Challa claims his soldiers are at the ready, when a large figure casts a shadow over the city. It moves slowly, darkly, threateningly over the sunlight.

Diana looks up to see a strangely angular spaceship descend upon the city like a hellish threat from the heavens and assumes a fighting stance only until it collides with the apparently invisible shield around the city.

“God, I love this place,” Bucky utters, and Diana has to agree.

Even Themyscira didn’t have that. 

More urgently, the group of Avengers head to the northern outskirts of the capital, and find the space already teeming with Wakandan forces.

The size of the army is formidable, and there’s an intimidating air around all of them.

They all line up near the front with T’Challa, and then they wait.

It’s a gorgeous day, really. There’s a breeze rusting the trees in the surrounding woods and the sun is beating down on them not violently, but with a startling brightness. Despite the almost eerie silence among the waiting armies, there’s a cheerful and, to Diana, unfamiliar chitter of birds around them.

They must only stand there like that for about five minutes, but it feels like hours.

Then, suddenly, a number of other spaceships, the same dark, angular model as the first, crash down in a blaze in the woods just outside of the border. Diana counts seven of them.

When two figures appear by the invisible border, one of them human-sized and the other Hulk-sized, Rogers, Nat, and T’Challa step up to meet them.

From the distance, it’s impossible to hear what they’re saying, but the tense stances remain.

“Did they surrender?”, Bucky asks when Rogers rejoins him in the stand-off.

Rogers looks grave. “Not exactly.”

T’Challa steps in front of the whole crowd, looking on at the collecting alien armies. With a booming voice, he shouts. “Yibambe!”

The Wakandan armies echo it back, once, twice, three times, their voices carrying across the field and to the city and echoing in the mountains.

Diana has never felt so determined to kick alien ass.

Suddenly, the aliens charge.

There are thousands of creatures emerging from the woods, even bigger and more disgusting than those in 2012. Diana watches as they come, and come, and come.

“What the hell.” Bucky’s remark is a disturbed statement, not a question.

“Looks like we pissed her off,” Nat remarks.

The creatures are throwing themselves at the border without an ounce of preservation, often slicing themselves in half in a gorey sight just for a chance to make it through.

“They’re killing themselves,” Okoye observes. Her disgust seems to overweigh her surprise.

Eventually, a few of the creatures do make it through, but their numbers are so small that they are easily deterred by just a few arrows or bullets or spheres from the Wakandan masses. The armies throw up their cloaks and erect a second blue shield from the aliens. 

Diana begins to feel almost hopeful, like this will be an easy fight, until Rogers points out that the aliens are surrounding the perimeter, spreading along the edges of the protection around them.

Bruce says that if they get through from the back, there’s nothing between them and Vision, nothing between them and the stone.

T’Challa holds a finger to his earpiece. “On my signal, open northwest section 17.”

A pause.

“On my signal,” he repeats.

Rogers cocks the shield on his right arm, because apparently he can do that now.

T’Challa calls something in Xhosa, and the cloak shield in front of the armies comes down. 

“Wakanda forever,” he shouts then, in English, and the armies chant it back.

Then, they all charge. 

Northwest section 17 opens.

  
  
  


It’s undoubtedly the largest, most complicated, most challenging fight Diana has ever been in.

There are figures everywhere, so many of them alien, and there are points when she doesn't know where up and down is and how many creatures she’s even currently up against.

The dry grass of the field is quickly soaked in blood, some of it a bright blue, but too much of it red. There’s yells and grunts and alien screeches and screams that sound like people dying.

Diana is terrified, but doesn’t find she has time to be. She’s too busy trying not to die, and occasionally trying to stop someone else from dying, though she rarely has focus left to even do that.

The battle quickly reaches a point where it almost looks impossible for them to win this. 

Diana watches as Rogers gets pinned to the ground, Bucky lying ten yards behind him, and Nat is fighting four creatures at once. T’Challa is nowhere to be seen and Bruce is fighting with a severely damaged suit and the armies are exhausted.

She barely dodges a particularly strong alien blow.

Then, suddenly, a loud rumble of thunder sounds in the sky and reverberates through the battle. Lighting flashes.

And in a glorious moment, Thor stands amidst the chaos, crackling with lightning and taking out a whole radius of creatures around him. There’s a humanoid racoon on his shoulder and a tree-like figure to his right.

As much as Diana dislikes everything Norse, she decides right then and there that she’ll gladly make an exception for the God of Thunder.

Thor got a haircut.

She hears Bruce bark out a laugh through the coms. 

“Oh, you guys are so screwed now.”

He’s right.

The tides turn to their favor as the newcomers join the fight, each powerful in their own right. The raccoon is surprisingly lethal for its size. 

The numbers of Thanos’ army dwindle, not prepared for the power and determination of the Avengers. There’s soon more blue than red blood on the field.

Then, suddenly, there’s another rumble reverberating through the battle. 

This time, Diana looks up not to find more aid for their fight, but instead finds the ground in front of them lifting, tearing open with great force.

The earth falls away to reveal giant, plow-like devices of alien tech, and Diana has no idea how they’re going to get out of this. Especially not when they start spinning toward the Wakandan armies at breakneck speed.

She almost prepares to get hit, to  _ die _ , when their saving grace lands on the ground in front of her.

Wanda has abandoned her post in the lab with Vision and Shuri and has joined the fight.

With nothing but her hands and the force of her immeasurable power, the Scarlet Witch lifts the devices into the air and throws them back at the alien armies. The ground of the field is ripped open, and with it, Wanda’s move must have taken out hundreds of the creatures.

A feeling of relief takes over the battle on their side, though this surely can’t mean victory. The fact that Wanda is on the field now means that she won’t be ready to destroy the stone as soon as it is removed from Vision’ forehead. And they have no idea how long that might take. 

Diana’s bets are on everywhere between ten minutes and ten hours, and the armies will not be able to stall as long as the latter.

The fears for Visions safety are confirmed a minute later, when Sam’s voice rings through the coms.

“Guys, we’ve got a Vision situation here.” A startled grunt follows, and Diana sees him collide with a creature in the sky.

“Somebody get to Vision,” Rogers shouts, and his sounds harried, frantic.

Bruce zips over them in his Hulk-suit. “I got him.”

“On my way,” Wanda adds, but then Diana watches the alien woman, one of the leaders, deliver a blow to her head.

Wanda falls to the ground, into a ditch created by the alien plows.

Diana follows.

“He’ll die alone,” she hears the black-haired woman say as she points her blade at Wanda. “As will you.”

Diana squares her shoulders. “She’s not alone.”

As if to prove her point, Natasha promptly lands behind her. Okoye appears on the other side of the alien woman, spear raised.

The alien charges, but she doesn’t get far. Even before Wanda rises and recovers, she’s on the ground, blue blood gushing from a wound in her chest.

Natasha, on the ground beside her, sits up with splatters of blue blood on her face. “That’s disgusting.”

Diana almost wants to laugh.

They’re still giving each other proud smiles when there’s another panicked massage through the coms. Bruce’s suit has been effectively rendered useless, and Vision needs backup pronto.

Rogers affirms that he’s on his way.

Wanda, still weakened from the blow, makes her way slowly over to the scene as well.

Natasha, Okoye, and Diana throw themselves back into the fight.

They’re reaching the last strip of the fight, or at least Diana  _ hopes _ they are, but she can’t be certain. After all, as far as anyone knows, the stone is still in Vision’s forehead.

Can it safely be removed? Or does Vision have to die?

It isn’t until about ten minutes later that there’s a palpable change in the scene. There’s no way Diana could ever put her finger on it, but there’s a definitive shift in the atmosphere. A heavy wind suddenly picks up.

Diana’s worst fears are confirmed when Rogers’ voice rings through the coms.

“Everyone on my position,” he orders gravely. “We have incoming.”

Along with all the other Avengers around her, Diana obeys. 

The wind continues to pick up as they all land in the small patch of woods. There’s an energy unlike anything Diana has ever felt before rustling the leaves of the trees, and she feels every hair on her body stand up.

They wait, anxious, fearful.

And then behind them, a cloud appears, dark and billowing and flickering with blue rays of light. Through the ashen haze, a figure appears.

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that it’s Thanos.

He’s at least ten feet tall, and large, almost Hulk-like. His skin is a pale purple, and his eyes, his small beady eyes, muster the lot of them almost cynically. There’s not a single ounce of empathy in them.

Her blood runs cold.

Rogers cocks his shield again. “Eyes up. Stay sharp.”

Collectively, they all decide that they won’t back down. If they go down, they go down fighting.

Bruce charges first. Even in his damaged suit, he’s still the largest of them, but then Thanos slows and removes him with a slow flick of his wrist.  Bruce, sans suit, melts into a wall of stone beside them.

Rogers is cast aside, thrown into the air in a series of flips.

Thanos catches T’Challa by the throat when he leaps at him, holds him up like a limp doll for about a second before casting him aside.

Sam charges with a yell, guns blazing, then crashes in a heap at Thanos’ feet.

“Wanda,” Diana hears Vision say. “It’s time.”

With a breaking heart, Diana finds he might be right.

Wanda protests of course, as anyone would, but she must realize it’s no use. And as her power surges to destroy the person she loves, Diana charges.

Predictably, she falls, cast aside by a single lifted finger. Her vision dances in and out of focus as she lays on the ground a small ways from T’Challa.

She can neither see nor hear right, nor does she really know where up and down is, but she’s aware of the other’s falling around her.

Natasha.

The tree.

Rhodey.

Okoye.

The black spots in her vision are barely clearing when she watches Rogers get back up from a few feet beside her and charge at Thanos again.

All things considered, he gets in a few very impressive punches at Thanos’ face with the razor sharp shields, but he was made to fight human bullies, not all-powerful alien ones. At an attempt to pull the glove of Infinity stones off of Thanos’ hands -- like that would  _ ever  _ work -- he falls again.

Bucky emerges from the trees in shout, gun held high, but he too is cast aside.

In a sudden blaze of red and golden light, the vibrant energy of the scene changes. Wanda sobs, and Vision must be dead.

They did it, Diana thinks. Now, Thanos will not be able to get all the stones. 

She’s wrong, of course.

Thanos, as he is in possession of the time stone, simply reverses the clock on Vision’s -- and the stone’s -- clock.

In horror, wishing her eyesight was back to being dark and blotchy, Diana watches as Thanos adds the golden stone to his gauntlet.

The energy around them all simmers, explodes, then settles. She can feel it in every nerve of her tired and broken body.

In a last blaze of hope, Thor descends upon the scene in a burst of lighting. 

He sticks his axe right into Thanos’ chest. He tells the alien something unintelligible, and then presses it in further.

Thanos cries out, and it’s the most promising sound Diana has ever heard.

But then, another mumble, followed by the one thing they’d been trying to prevent.

A metallic snap of fingers echoes through the clearing, through the field, through Wakanda, through the universe.

Diana feels it in her soul, until suddenly she feels nothing at all.

With a frown, she sits up, leaning on her left arm for support.  It gives away under her, and when looks down in confusion, she finds it disintegrating into a slate gray dust.  She watches as it takes her hand, then her elbow, and then her shoulder.

And then, she sees nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and i oop-


	5. thanos (again)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long! i hope it was worth the wait :)

Suddenly, Diana sees again.

Or rather, she _is_ again, though she has no idea how or why.

Something is different. That, she registers immediately.

For one, she’s not in pain. Last she remembers, her bones were aching and her head was pounding and there were multiple cuts and grazes throughout her body. Now she feels just fine, like a clean slate. Her skin is free of wounds.

When she sits up, she finds that her surroundings have also changed.

She’s still in Wakanda, but it’s not the Wakanda she last remembers seeing. Gone are the battling armies and the war-torn landscape soaked in blue and red blood. It’s cooler than it was then too, and more windy.

Thanos is nowhere to be seen, and neither are his armies or the energy of his stones. 

Diana also can’t see Rogers, or Nat, or Thor, or Rhodey. 

What she can see is other figures rising slowly beside her, groggily finding their own bearings.

She spots Sam and Wanda and Bucky, and the tree from the battle. Nakia and T’Challa appear from the shrubbery to her right.

They all look just as confused and disoriented as she must, though they all also look healthy.

Slowly, Diana rises, not quite trusting her body to hold her. It does.

The birds chirp loudly around them, and a breeze rustles through the trees. The atmosphere is strangely peaceful considering what they last encountered here.

Through the leaves, Diana spots that there are other figures appearing on the fields too. Wakandan soldiers, seemingly just as startled as they are, materializing out of thin air.

It’s Sam that first interrupts the confused serenity. 

“What the fuck?”

Diana can’t even begin to answer his question, because frankly she’s asking herself the same thing.

“Where is everyone?”, Wanda asks.

“I am Groot.”

They all stare at the tree for a moment, Groot, apparently, but don’t entirely know how that’s currently relevant. He looks down a little dejectedly.

T’Challa notices the Wakandan soldiers gathering on the field and frowns. With a look that’s determined and confused and somehow still calming, he steps away from the Avengers and toward his people. Nakia stays by his side.

Groot begins to wander around the edges of the clearing, seemingly looking for something.

Diana watches him, realizing that while they’re all lost and scared, he’s practically alone. They don’t even speak his language. He’s probably searching for the humanoid racoon he arrived with.

“Am I tripping or were we turning into dust last time we were here?” Sam’s exclamation would almost be funny if it weren’t for their dire situation.

Because he’s right. Last Diana figures any of them remember, they were _turning into dust_. Which is insane, and terrifying.

“Thanos succeeded,” she concludes. They all turn to her. “His goal was to wipe out half the universe. We must have been part of the wiped half.”

Wanda lets out a quick breath and leans her head on her hand. Sam swears quietly.

“Do you think everyone else is okay? The ones that stayed?”, Bucky suddenly speaks up. He seems strangely unnerved at his own circumstance, but Diana guesses it’s all perspective.

“Someone must have gotten us back, it has to have been them,” she says. She adds, “I’m sure Rogers is fine,” because that must have been his question.

Some of the tension seeps out of Bucky’s shoulders. He still looks anxious of course, but he’s minutely calmed, and if Diana wasn’t so anxious herself she would just about coo at the fact that his sole worry is Rogers.

Sam looks less pacified. “Well, where are they?”

Diana looks for a comforting answer, but finds none. “I don’t know.”

And then Wanda breaks her silence. “He’s really gone. He didn’t come back with the rest of us.”

Diana’s heart breaks for her, and she tires to think of something, _anything_ comforting to say, but comes up empty. 

The tense and sorrowful silence is interrupted by a relieved cheer from the field, and they turn to watch Shuri and T’Challa embrace.

Their hug is an island of hope in a land of uncertainty.

How long has it been? 

Diana doesn't think it could have been more than a few days, a week or two at most, but something in her gut suggests differently. She doesn’t know Wakanda well at all, of course, but the city looked more vibrant last time, and the grass was not this high.

And Sam’s question echoes in her mind. Where _are_ the others? 

It must have been them who brought them back. It has to have been.

But what did they have to do to reverse everything? Why aren’t they here to welcome them back?

Sam steps forward and lays an arm around a shaking Wanda. She leans into him heavily. 

Bucky musters the two of them with sad eyes, but doesn't seem able to offer any comfort himself. He rakes a hand through his hair.

Groot sits down on the ground, looking unbelievably child-like given that he looks like a tree.

A silence engulfs them again. Wanda’s grief and the chirping of the birds above them are the only sounds in the clearing. The breeze carries other confused voices and some relieved laughter to them from the field.

A loud shout rings over the landscape as some figures emerge from the surrounding villages. The voices are happy, _so_ happy, and sound utterly disbelieving. 

Diana doesn’t understand Xhosa well, and even her enhanced hearing can’t make out what’s being said, but nothing about the interactions she watches from afar, nothing about the cries she’s hearing, support that they were gone for a week.

_Gods._

She looks back to the others, who are already exchanging daunted looks.

“How long were we gone?”, Bucky asks.

None of them know the answer.

“I mean it can’t have been too long, right?” Sam looks at them like he’s hoping they can’t provide any counter evidence.

“It seems it might have been.”

“I- What the fuck?” 

It’s Bucky who asks this time. Diana still doesn't have an answer.

Suddenly, so suddenly that Groot jumps about three feet into the air, a circle of orange sparks materializes in the clearing before them. 

Two like it appear in the fields.

Diana steps toward where Bucky, Sam, and Wanda are standing and watches as Groot gets up and joins them. 

The last time a portal opened here, Thanos stepped through it.

They all tense, hands grasping at their weapons of choice. Diana steps in front.

But the figure that steps through it this time is far less imposing than Thanos was. 

It’s a stout Asian man, round-faced and friendly looking, but with a grimly determined expression. They stare for a moment while he musters the lot of them.

“Is this all of you?”, he asks.

They frown, not quite sure how to answer the question and if they can trust this stranger. Diana gestures vaguely to the field in response.

The man seems satisfied enough with the answer and then steps forward. “Welcome back,” he tells them. “We’ve got another fight to win. Come with me.”

He seems to think that this is enough explanation and turns back to the portal, but they don’t follow. They don’t even know who this man is.

Sam says as much.

The man turns back to them with a huff. “I don’t have time to explain all of it. I’m Master Wong, sorcerer of the New York sanctum and protector of our reality. Thanos succeeded then, but the Avengers brought us back. They’re fighting him again, and they need back up.”

He turns again, but Diana interrupts him.

“So they’re okay?”

“They’re alive.”

Diana looks behind her, exchanging looks with the others. They’re not sure they can trust this stranger, but what other option do they have?

With one last questioning look, it’s Bucky that steps forward first.

He swallows. “Well then let’s go.”

And so they follow the stranger through the portal.

  


Diana’s not sure what she was expecting on the other end, but it wasn’t this.

The landscape they step into is so war-torn and mangled that it’s unrecognizable. They could be anywhere.

The sky is dark with dust and smoke, and most of the light illuminating the scene stems from the fire of what must have been explosions. Thanos’ army blocks out any light from the sky, moving slowly and menacingly upon the emerging fighters from the charcoal skies. 

Between them and the orange glow of the circles, Diana searches for their own armies, but instead finds Thor on the ground to her right and Tony slowly rising from the rubble to her left. She can’t immediately see any others.

Only Rogers stands upright between them all, swaying slightly and with a broken shield on his arm. Diana’s breath stutters.

“Of fucking course,” Bucky swears from beside her.

Sam comes flying through a portal above them, wings spread wide like an angel coming down upon the abysmal scene. “On your left,” the com crackles.

Rogers’ shoulders tense, and then he turns around. 

His face, beyond the fact that it’s dirty and beaten and bruised, is nothing short of euphoric.

His eyes scan those coming in, softening with each friend he recognizes, and when his eyes land on Bucky, they stay for a moment. For two.

He smiles the most exhausted and elated smile Diana has ever seen, and tightens the shield on his arm.

With his free hand, he reaches for seemingly nothing, but a second later, Mjolnir flies to him. 

Diana can’t say she’s surprised, but she is taken aback for a moment, exchanges a startled look with Wanda.

The coms in the ears of those emerging are no longer entirely compatible with the ones in those that stayed, but they still automatically tune into the same frequency, so that the words come through with a static distance.

She still hears Rogers loud and clear when he turns back to the dark looming armies, and shifts into a familiar fighting stance.

“Avengers,” he grits, “assemble.”

They do.

Four hours later, Tony Stark is dead.

Diana stands in the dusty air, where she was fighting aliens just a moment ago. The pieces of dust fall around them like a dark antithesis of snow. Natasha’s gun is still in her hand from when they had swapped weapons not two minutes ago.

Pepper kisses Stark’s cheek and cries. The Parker kid heaves. 

Nat drops down on one knee, and the rest follow. T’Challa, Carol, Quill. The threatening-looking blue alien, and Thor’s friend. Scott, Rogers, Sam. 

She drops down as well.

Diana can’t say she knew Stark that well, in the end. Mostly, she knew was loud and liked showing off and making jokes at other people’s expense. She knew he was a genius.

It’s not until he’s dying that she realizes he was her friend, in his own way. 

When a tear wells up in her eye, she lets it fall.

The moment seems to stretch on forever. It’s as though a blanket of grief has settled over the exhausted group like a blanket, sinking into the deep cracks the battle had created.

How does one move on from this moment?

They’ve fought the fight of their lives, tooth and nail, and they’ve won. 

But at what cost?

A few of the kneeling figures gradually begin to collapse, sitting down on the upturned dirt heavily. They swallow, cry, heave, or just stare.

The humanoid raccoon settles on Groot with a tired happiness and turns its face into the wood.

Natasha stumbles over to where Sam is sitting on the earth and sets herself down half on top of him. He only startles for a short moment before he puts his arms around her and pulls her close. He presses a long kiss to her temple while tears streak her face.

Diana reaches out for a shell-shocked Wanda and grasps her hand.

Rogers is shaking. He’s still knelt in the dirt, teary-eyed and tired.

He hasn’t moved for too long, and Diana is about to reach out to him, but Bucky beats her to it.

He rises from where he was kneeling and walks cautiously toward his best friend. Softly, he lays a hand on the shaking shoulder and says something Diana can’t catch.

At that, Rogers crumbles. He falls to the ground, half onto Bucky, grasping at him with desperate hands. Sobs rock his shoulders.

Bucky wraps himself around Rogers and grips him tight. He’s running a hand through Rogers’ hair and uttering words into the side of his head. 

Bucky shoots Diana a shaken look over Rogers’ shoulder.

It’s been more than a week.

  
  
  


“Five fuckin’ years.”

Sam sighs and leans back on his armchair, staring incredulously as though this isn’t the thousandth time he’s heard and said it in the past few days.

Natasha grasps his hand and leans on his shoulder. 

(It seems five years were enough perspective for her to stop dancing around it. She’d kissed Sam as soon as she stopped crying, right there on the battlefield surrounded by dust and dozens of other superheroes.

He, to no one's surprise, was more than on board with it.)

In the whirlwind of a post-battle haze -- the injured, the clean up, the grief -- this is the first semi-peaceful moment Diana has had with the bunch since it all.

They’re in Rogers’ living room, the same Brownstone Diana visited him all those years ago. It hasn’t been lived in much in the past few years, but now there’s scattered mugs on every cabinet and blankets over the couches. 

Rogers and Bucky are under one of them, so entangled that Diana can’t quite tell where one ends and the other begins.

Wanda is curled up in one of the armchairs, a coffee cup warming her hands. Diana sits across from her. 

The stray cat that has come to live in the Brownstone during Rogers’ absence is stretched out on the carpet between them. Bucky wants to keep her, and Diana suspects Rogers’ will let him.

They all watch as she turns onto her belly in a lazy stretch. Sounds of a reawakened New York filter in through the open window.

“What did we miss?”, Wanda interrupts the silence. “Anything good?”

Steve huffs into Bucky’s chest. “No.”

“Well,” Natasha smirks, “there was a pretty good Lorde album. Super depressing, of course, but pretty good.”

Wanda snorts a little laugh into her coffee.

Natasha pauses, and sighs. “But, yeah. Otherwise, absolutely nothing good.”

The white cat jumps off the coffee table and sniffs at the gray of some day old tea. It curls up on the stained tablecloth.

“There were food shortages, lots.” Nat starts, because it needs to be said. “Looting in every store. General lawlessness, especially in the beginning when everyone was just scared shitless and pointing fingers. Suicide rates went through the roof. There were little civil wars all over the place. Here, Brazil, Italy, China, Pakistan, India, Poland, Egypt, the UK.”

“Don’t forget France,” Rogers quips, face still half in Bucky’s shirt.

“Oh, right. France was really brutal. It was almost three years, too.”

“Fuck,” Diana breathes. 

Wanda lets out a long breath. Sam swears.

Bucky sits up a little with Rogers still on top of him. “I wanna hear the Lorde album.”

A small laugh ripples through the room, and Nat gets up to connect to the speaker.

  
  


They all gather around a quantum-travel platform two weeks later. Bruce is there to oversee the science, and the rest of them -- Nat, Sam, Wanda, Bucky, and Diana -- are all there to see Rogers off on his mission. He should only be gone for five seconds to them, but his mission is sure not to be short or easy to him. 

It's a job that sucks, but needs to be done, so of course he was the first to volunteer to do it.

He never did know how to give up a fight.

He’s told them fifty times that it’s completely unnecessary for them all to have come, but he still gives them all a tight hug before he steps on.

Diana hears Natasha deliver her usual line to Rogers, somewhere between a flirty quip and a joke and threat and declaration of love. 

Sam tells him not to fuck it up.

Wanda just hugs him close for an extra beat or two.

When Rogers steps up to Diana, she doesn’t quite know what to tell him. It’s just another mission, a composition he’s worked with before. He should be back in five seconds. But somehow, it feels a little bigger.

She settles for pulling his large frame to herself and giving him a tight squeeze. 

“Last mission?”, she whispers, just for him to hear.

Rogers tenses for just a second. “Maybe.”

She just smiles at him as she pulls back. 

The words Bucky and Rogers exchange sound like an echo from the past, like things they’ve said before. And, given their penchant for one liners and shared memories, it probably is.

Rogers gives them all one last smile of fondness and determination, and gives Bruce a quick hug before he steps up to the platform.

“You ready, Cap?”, Bruce asks.

“As I’ll ever be.”

And then Rogers is gone.

Bruce begins a countdown, and Diana swallows.

_Five._

Bucky lets out a shuddering breath beside her. She’s worried about Rogers too, of course, but she can’t imagine Bucky’s plight.

_Four._

He’s heaving now, and Diana starts to reach out her hand to calm him.

_Three._

But then he’s turning, angling himself toward the woods and away from Diana and the others, away from the platform. Diana frowns.

_Two._

Diana averts her gaze away from the platform and to Bucky, but he’s already beginning to walk away. What is he doing?

_One._

She takes a step away as well, holds an arm out to make a grab for Bucky’s hand. The flesh one, of course. No one but Rogers gets away with touching the metal one.

And then she’s expecting the whirr of the machine behind her, but it doesn’t happen. She hears how the others begin to argue and feels anxiety gnaw at her bones, but she’s focused on Bucky.

“Hey,” she starts. She catches his hand, but he shakes her off and increases his pace. “Where are you going?”

He turns back incrementally then, and she sees that he’s close to crying. “Does it matter?”, he asks.

Diana frowns, is about to open her mouth again, but then the machine starts whirring loudly behind her and cuts her off. 

“What the _fuck_?”, someone exclaims, and Diana feels her blood run cold.

It’s been 105 years, but Diana would know that voice anywhere. That doesn’t mean she lets herself believe it.

She’s still looking at Bucky, with her back to the platform and a view of the woods around them, but she watches the emotions pass over Bucky’s face; Surprise, confusion, incredulity. A touch of joy, bright beneath the layers of muddle. 

“Son of a gun,” he breathes, an echo of Rogers all those years ago, the day Diana first met him.

Steeling herself for whatever she may find behind her, Diana turns. The simple action takes a herculean effort.

And when her eyes find her target, she sees that next to Rogers, on the stark white platform, is Steve Trevor. 

He’s in his big jacket from 1918, ratty and brown and so incredibly warm. His gorgeous face is screwed up with something between anger and confusion as he glares at Rogers and then surveys the area around them. He’s breathing heavily.

Then, his eyes find hers.

His bewilderment is graced with a smile, and Diana thinks her legs might give out. 

“Diana?”

She lets out a shaky, watery breath. 

“Steve.”

His smile widens, and then before she even realizes it, Diana is moving toward him. She leaps onto the platform smoothly, easily, and then suddenly she’s holding him and he’s holding her and nothing feels real.

There’s a whole number of questions being asked around her, but she couldn’t care less about that right then.

Rogers explains himself to the others. He’d stolen a few more Pym particles from the S.H.I.E.L.D base in the 70s and decided to make another trip for Diana’s sake. She had told him about Steve, and he couldn’t let the opportunity go to waste.

There’s never been any doubt in Diana’s mind that Steve Rogers is a brave and loving and incredible man, but now she knows it, feels it so deeply that she doesn’t know what to do with all her gratitude.

But that’s a problem for later.

Now, she clutches at Steve with the full breadth of her desperation, hands fisting in his jacket and in the hair at the nape of his neck. She fears that if she lets go now he’ll disappear again, so she tightens her grip on his garment until she thinks it might rip. He smells like sweat and dirt and engine fuel and every single one of Diana’s dreams since 1918. Her face is wet, she doesn't know when she started crying. 

“Hey,” he says softly, and Diana lets out a sob. He holds her just a bit tighter.

“I love you,” she tells him, muffled in the collar of his coat. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.” 

She can feel the confusion radiating off of Steve, but he just presses a kiss to her hair. “I love you, too.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say it back,” she heaves. “I’m so fucking sorry. And I shouldn’t have let you get on that plane. I shouldn’t have fought with you about Veld. It wasn’t your fault. And-”

“Diana.” Steve interrupts her, softly but purposefully. “It’s okay. I’ve already forgiven you. And I’m okay, right?”

Diana swallows. She chokes back another sob.

Steve pulls back then, just enough to see Diana’s face. He strokes a thumb over her tear-streaked cheeks, almost absent mindedly.

“Did I-” He starts, but cuts himself off. 

He just looks at Diana with thinking, narrowed eyes for a moment, and Diana knows he must be figuring out what happened. He must deduce that without Rogers there to pull him out, he would have been dead, and that in a way, that had already happened. He swallows, but his eyes remain warm. 

“How long has it been?”

Diana looks up at him, at his blue eyes and familiar smile. There’s not really a way to break it to him easily, so she strokes a thumb over the curve of his cheek and answers. “A hundred and five years. Or a hundred, depending on how you count.”

He lets out a long breath. 

  
  
  
  


In the whirlwind of her emotions, Diana doesn’t notice the goings on about twelve feet behind her. 

Bucky does, of course, not that he quite lets himself believe it. He can’t even believe Steve came back.

He was certain that he wouldn’t, that he would stay in the 40s with Carter, with the gorgeous spitfire of a woman that was everything he deserved.

But he’s here, in 2025, alive and breathing and the most beautiful thing Bucky has ever seen. He has his shield back, what must be the original. And he’s brought a guest, Diana’s love as it seems, but Bucky doesn’t have any mental capacity left to process that when he’s still wrapping his head around the first bit.

Steve watches the embracing pair on the platform for a long moment, a smile on his face, and then he turns, looks directly at Bucky. His eyes brighten.

Bucky watches as Steve steps off of the platform where Sam comes to meet him. Instead of greeting him with the hug Bucky would expect, he almost offhandedly shoves his shield at him.

“Sam, can you take this for a moment?”, he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer as Sam takes it with a startled sound. He’s still looking at Bucky.

And then he’s walking toward him, quickly, determinedly, and Bucky shoots him a confused frown.

For some reason, this only makes Steve’s smile widen, and then he’s right in front of Bucky and he’s grabbing Bucky’s face and pressing his mouth to his.

And if Bucky’s brain was short-circuiting before, it’s nothing compared to what it’s doing now.

He doesn’t know what’s happening, where up and down is. All he knows is the long fingers in his hair and the familiar scent enveloping him and the softness of Steve’s lips on his own. 

In a haze, he places his hands on the curve of Steve’s waist and presses closer, tries to let muscle memory take over.

He might be dreaming, but he sure as hell is going to enjoy what he’s given.

Bucky may be biased, Steve is a _phenomenal_ kisser. He’s kissing Bucky with great determination, but no force at all. His kiss is warm and all-encompassing, but soft.

It feels simultaneously like floating through the clouds coming home. Ecstasy and groundedness all in one.

Steve pulls back after either five seconds or five hours, and when Bucky reluctantly opens his eyes, he’s met with the most warm and beautiful look he’s ever been on the receiving end of. He, on the other hand, can’t seem to tell his eyes to be anything but stunned.

Steve leans down, presses one, two, three more little kisses to Bucky’s lips because apparently that’s something he does now. He brushes his nose against Bucky’s.

And because it’s the only thought Bucky’s brain can produce, he opens his mouth in a whisper. “You came back.”

Steve pulls away a bit further then, a frown on his face, and Bucky sees how red he is, how gorgeously flustered. His hands fall down to grasp at Bucky’s as he looks at Bucky incredulously. “What? Of course I came back. Wasn’t my first rodeo.”

“No, I-” Bucky feels increasingly wrongfooted under Steve’s gaze, and then begins to realize how stupid he’s been. How could he let his insecurities question Steve’s loyalty? “This is stupid, I guess, but I thought you were going to stay with Carter.”

Steve lets out an incredulous laugh. “What? Buck-”

“It’s stupid, I know.”

“ _So_ stupid,” Steve affirms. “Sure, Peggy’s great, but what am I gonna do in the fuckin’ 40s? Live without you?”

Bucky huffs out a little laugh and then looks away as he feels his eyes well up. 

“C’mon Buck,” Steve laments, and Bucky looks back at him. “ ‘Til the end of the line, remember? You’re it for me.”

And because Bucky thinks he might burst if he keeps it inside for another second, he grins and tells Steve the only thing he’s been sure of since he was fourteen. “I love you. I’m in love with you.”

Steve grins back widely, eyes bright beneath a thin sheen of tears. “I love you, too.”

Bucky pulls Steve back in, kisses that stupid grin off his face, and thinks that if he had to do all of that again, that century straight from hell, he would do it in a heartbeat as long as he ended up back here.

  
  
  
  


Twelve feet away, Diana looks up as the voices around them suddenly whoop at an entirely new volume level.

Arms still tightly around Steve, she turns her head to where she can see Bruce staring.

There, in the clearing where Diana had left Bucky, Rogers is now standing with his large hands clutching at either side of Bucky’s face, kissing him full on the mouth. Bucky lifts his arms to grip at Rogers’ waist and back and reciprocates enthusiastically.

Diana can’t help the startled laugh that escapes her, and the whoop she lets out herself.

She turns back to Steve with a grin.

_Gods_.

He’s here.

And he’s bright and he’s strong and he’s beautiful and he’s _hers._

She kisses him, and it feels like coming home.

Steve’s lips are warm and soft and familiar, moving against hers like she’s something delicate, something to be treated with utmost care.

Her hand tightens on his collar the other curls around his jaw.

His ocean eyes shine down at her when they pull back.

“I love you,” she tells him again, because she never wants to go another minute without telling him.

“I love you, too.”

She’s about to open her mouth again when a call from behind them cuts through the clearing.

Sam is shouting at Rogers and Bucky, something about getting a room, which- is fair. Wanda can’t seem to stop laughing.

When she turns back to Steve, the look on his face is two parts overwhelmed, four parts confused, and ten parts happy. He huffs out a dazed laugh. “ _What_ is going on?”

Diana smiles up at him, steals another kiss from his lips, because she can do that now. “It’s a very long story.”

Steve just gazes at her for a moment. His eyes twinkle, shining in the autumn sun of the woods, and they’re just the right shade of blue. “Do we have time?”

“We do.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> et voila!
> 
> this story took so much longer than it should have, but i'm really quite happy with it. this is and was entirely self-indulgent, something that had been building up in my brain, and i wanted to put out there. i just love diana so much -- and if you know me at all i am obsessed with stevebucky -- and i started thinking about the paralells between the two steves, and how well diana would have gotten along with cap. and then i started building this little scene in my head where they're friends, and rogers comes back in endgame with steve trevor, and then this was born. so, yeah, very self indulgent, and my arguably least popular fic.
> 
> but, hey! if you're actually here reading this story, i'd love to hear from you! you can comment here or hit me up on tumblr and we can shout about how wonder woman should have been mcu :)
> 
> consider [reblogging](https://its-tortle.tumblr.com/post/641539792496132096/passed-down-like-folksongs-the-love-lasts-so)?

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are so dearly appreciated. 
> 
> follow me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/its-tortle) if you are so inclined! :)


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